Crysis
Crysis is still one of the most GPU-centric games on the market and is considered by many to be the standard that new hardware is measured against. Crysis features both DX9 and DX10 support for Windows Vista, and we’ll be running it in both configurations for testing.
We used the “Crysis Benchmark Tool” to benchmark Crysis. The “benchmark_cpu” timedemo was used. There is quite a bit of building destruction and other heavy physics going on in this particular timedemo, and it is a good choice for CPU benchmarking. We used two different configurations for testing. The first uses a 1024×768 resolution and the Medium IQ settings to simulate a substantial CPU bottleneck. The second configuration is set for DX10 rendering and a higher 1680×1050 resolution with “High” IQ settings.
Amazingly, the X3 720 does better by a few frames per second than its X4 940 big brother. Thinking this must have been some sort of fluke, we re-ran the test and were still getting average frame rates better than the X4 940. Considering a 200MHz clock deficit and one disabled core, this is quite surprising. The only thing we can conclude is that Crysis benefits from the higher memory controller clock speed or the higher HyperTransport frequency.
This odd finding seems to hold true for the X4 810 as well. With 2MB less L3 cache and a 200MHz lower core clock speed, it manages a small lead over the X4 920. That considered, the Intel processors still remain king when it comes to this particular gaming benchmark.
Clearly, Crysis benefits quite a bit from as many as three cores, making the X3 processors look even more enticing here. The AMD quads do not seem to have any benefit over the AMD triples in Crysis.
Articles RSS