Quad Core vs Dual Core: Q9550S vs. E8600, Part III – CPU Scaling with CrossFire
FarCry 2
FarCry 2 uses the name of the original FarCry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions: the United Front for Liberation and Labor and the Alliance for Popular Resistance. Your mission is a simple one, to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are sent into.
The FarCry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well and it runs on a wide range of PC hardware. The FarCry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game and it does work very well. One thing to note, is FarCry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by the Dunia engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing up-until-now. We notice recent improvement in performance by ATi’s Catalyst Team after this AAA title was released.
FarCry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 first with AI disabled:
FarCry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 first with AI enabled:
FarCry 2 benchmark at 1680×1050 first with AI disabled:
Now at 1680×1050 with AI enabled:
Very interesting. This time our Q9550S shows a distinct and solid advantage over E8600; even its extra +260 Mhz do not compensate. We do definitely see quad core gaming and CPU scaling advantages over dual, yet in no place do we see a place where the dual core is “slow”. However, this is the future of gaming in our opinion.
Great article. Here’s what I found most interesting
If we just look at the minimum framerates for the chips are similar clockspeeds (Q9550s @ 3.4 vs E8600 @ 3.33 and Q9550s @ 4.0 vs E8600 @ 4.0) the quad core comes out on top the majority of the time.
For the two-way Xfire tests, the Q9550 (at similar clockspeed to) beats the E8600’s minimum framerates in COD4, UT3, Lost Planet, HL2: LC, FEAR, ET: QW, WiC, FC2, and PT Boats. The two chips, for the most part, tie in the games Stalker, Crysis, and X3. The only game where the quad loses is Call of Juarez.
When we look at the three-way XFire tests, the results are basically the same except Lost Planet and PT Boats moves from the “win” category to the “tie” category for the quad core.
I wonder what’s up with the Call of Juarez results. Even with the chips at the same clock speed, the quad core loses fairly significantly. At 4.00 GHz, the quad’s minimum framerate is 31 while the dual’s is 42.
I wondered about CoJ as i was testing and repeated those benchmarks many, many times; far more than with any other of my tests. I would say that some of it is probably partly because of the Cat 9-2 drivers. If you look back on this benchmark to our September testing with Cat 8-1 all the way through Cat 8-12hotfix, there is definitely some variance with multi-GPU performance.
So let me theorize that there appears to be a ‘hitch’ in CoJ – you can actually watch it “stutter” in a couple of places – that the slower clocked Quad simply cannot overcome that appear to really skew the bottom [and thus average and max] framerates. It exaggerates what happens when you actually play CoJ, similar to my old STALKER benches that had way too high of a maximum as they panned the sky. The CoJ benchmark was also never updated, although the game was. That makes it somewhat flawed in my opinion, as the vendors are continuing to optimize for the game, not for the old benchmark. In the future, it will not be so important – as for example, in my current benching, “Vista 64 vs. Vista32-bit”, my Q9550s is at 4.0Ghz where this is not observed quite so much.
It also means that I am considering making a custom timedemo from the latest patched CoJ. I wish Techland would update theirs. Or maybe I will wait for “CoJ 2, Bound in Blood” and use that new benchmark instead. I am looking forward to its release, soon.
http://www.nugadgets.com/products/ProductDetails/68514Call_of_Juarez_2_PC.1496901.1.html
they say 1-3 weeks, but that is not official. The trailer says, “Summer”.
Here is a trailer on You.Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CZi_FKsyPE
You also need to realize that CrossFireX-3 is still imperfect; you can see it’s scaling is still not “bang-for-buck”. Clearly there has been drastic improvements overall in the CFX-3 Catalyst drivers over the last 6 months, but there is plenty of room for more.
Yep, I can’t wait to see how multi-core CPUs and GPUs take off this year. Check out the following results for the new Tom Clancy game:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,679029/Tom-Clancys-HAWX-Benchmark-review-with-15-CPUs/Practice/
Those were some of the most striking results I’ve come across yet – even more striking than GTA4.
Hey you I’m a big fan of your blog. Hope you keep updating it regularly.