3DMark 2001SE, Comanche 4, Call of Duty
Greater levels of cache have often been instrumental in superior gaming performance. Just have a look at the benchmark results between a standard 3.2GHz Pentium 4 and a souped-up Extreme Edition. Generally speaking, the more data you can pack into the die, the better the gaming performance. The converse has to be true, too. That's exactly why the Celeron was shunned as a gaming CPU.
Frequent trips back to slow main memory to retrieve the necessary data isn't conducive to decent performance, as the above graph clearly demonstrates. The bandwidth-starved lobby tests were predictably poor.
Comanche 4, the cache-loving benchmark, paints a more vivid picture of the Celeron's gaming inadequacies.
Our low-detail Call Of Duty benchmark, run at 800x600, confirms much of what's observed above. The Celeron 2.8GHz's architecture goes directly into the face of the preferred design for excellent games' performance. For that we must look towards the Athlon 64 Clawhammer line.
