“Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Intel’s Q9550s vs. E8600, Part Two
X3-Terran Conflict
X3:Terran Conflict is another beautiful stand-alone benchmark that runs multiple tests and will really strain a lot of video cards with its extra-high polygon count. X3:Terran Conflict (X3:TC) is a space trading and combat simulator from Egosoft and is the most recent of their X-series of computer games released last October, 2008. X3: Terran Conflict is a standalone expansion of X3: Reunion, based in the same universe and on the same engine. It was also developed by several members of the X-Tended Mod team and features assets from it. It complements the story of previous games in the X-Universe and especially continues the events after the end of X3: Reunion.
Compared to X3: Reunion, Terran Conflict features a larger universe, more ships, and new missions. The X-Universe is huge. The Terran faction was added with their own set of technology including powerful ships and stations. Many new weapons systems were developed for the expansion and it generally received good reviews. It has a rather steep learning curve.
X3:Terran Conflict at 1920×1200
(oops, e8600 “max” results are switched with GTX280)
X3:Terran Conflict at 1650×1080:
Here we see some decent CPU scaling. There is some variation as this benchmark is divided up into many sub tests yet performance scaling appears to be king where the fastest CPU wins.
GTAIV and L4D would have been good games to add to this suite. Looks like there still isn’t a huge difference in dual vs. quad as long as you have enough speed, even in games that are multithreaded, although I think you’ll see bigger differences when you move to your Xfire tests.
Thanks for the comments. L4D is Source Engine and will scale just like HL2 which I will test next. It takes quite a bit of time to create reliable custom timedemos. Look for CoD4 to be added in the CrossFire tests which will be in a more detailed review in a couple of weeks.
In the meantime, I have a nice comparison of Phenom II vs. Athlon X2-6000+ – both with SLI’d GTX280s; probably next weekend. I will present an extreme example of CPU scaling – in some extreme cases, the frame rates doubled with the faster CPU.
Ah, I thought L4D was multi-threaded unlike a lot of Source games, but I could be mistaken.
And I’m looking forward to your AMD shootout, because I essentially have an Athlon 6000+ and I feel I’m CPU-limited in a few games, specifically TF2.
It is true that the newer Source games are enhanced and more demanding than the earlier ones. Multi-threading is probably improved. I probably will pick L4D up as a benchmark, although Source is really not one of the more demanding engines.
Here is the Source Engine Wiki:
http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Engine_Features
“Multi-core. Source engine games utilize multi-core processors in both the PC and XBox 360 to deliver high-performance gaming experiences.”
The benchmarking is complete on the AMD shootout and I believe you will find the results moving from 6000+ to Phenom II much more extreme than in this current one.
We start out with a 6000+ in an AM2 board – nforce 590 based (Abit AN932x SLI); then we upgraded the board to an AM2+ ASUS Crosshair Formula II board (nforce 780A based), for Phenom II. Benchmarks were run on the performance difference from nforce 590 to 780a with the 6000+. Then with Phenom II. Everything else in the system stayed the same with SLI’d GTX280s. Of course, the OS was reinstalled but stayed as Vista64 throughout the benching.
The source engine shows very little benefit from multi-core. The touted improvements Valve promised (scaling to n-cores) have only been demonstrated in their map building tools, but not in actual games.
It’s also capped at ~300 FPS, so it skews maximum framerates above that.
Nice, makes me feel fine with a dual core still. I had thought that by now quad cores would be implemented better, guess that isn’t the case.
Thanks for the info. I’m just speaking from experience with the Source engine. When I enable multicore support in TF2 (using mat_queue_mode), my framerates (subjectively speaking) jump up by at least 50%. In some spots on maps, my framerate will drop below 30 without mat_queue_mode set to 2, but with it my framerate usually stays above 40. The bad part is that the game likes to crash itself and my system.
Also L4D, even during heavy action, runs (and looks, IMO) much better than TF2, although I haven’t done any testing with the game’s setting itself.