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.
Our quad cores fare well against each other in this Crysis benchmark, but the E8400 is the star of the show in a bottle-necked situation. Performance here seems to be related to system memory performance, with the DDR2 systems pulling ahead.
With Crysis cranked up to high settings, the Phenom II X4 955 doesn’t stand out, but does meet the competition nicely. These numbers are so close, it seems fair to say there’s very little discernible difference between the chips in this test.