High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

ARMA 2 Demo

ARMA 2 is our newest benchmark and it is taken from the third installment in their series of realistic modern military simulation games from Bohemia Interactive.  It features a player-driven story with more than 70 weapons and over 100 different vehicles. With a game world of 225 square km that is taken from actual surveillance photos, you can expect truly massive online battles with five distinct armed groups to choose from.  ARMA2 can be considered a tactical shooter where the player commands a squad of AI – or many squads –  with elements of real-time tactics.

ARMA 2 Demo was released in late June, 20o9 and coming in at 2.6 GB, the ARMA 2 demo allows you to experience the same gameplay that is featured in the full version of ARMA 2 – including multiplayer, as well as a few of the vehicles, weapons and units. The ARMA2 demo also contains a part of Chernarus terrain, a small section of the full game world set in the fictional “Black Russia”. There is also a massive performance hit on any platform when maximum details are enabled at the resolutions that we test.

Here is our HD 4870-X2 at 1920×1200 resolution:

Now with our GTX 280 at 1920×1200:

Next is the HD 4870-X2 at 1680×1050:

Now we finally finish up all of our benchmarks with our GTX 280 at 1680×1050 resolution:

We see some rather interesting results with ARMA2 that require further investigation.  With our HD 4870-X2, it appears that there is more than just framerate scaling tied to CPU core speed; here the tri-core 720 X3 falls miserably behind both the quad-core and dual-core CPUs.  With our GTX 280, the results are a bit more even within the tested resolutions but the oddities the benchmarks exhibit can probably be attributed to a brand new game and its issues with drivers.  We look forward to coming back to ARMA2 with newer drivers in the “motherboard” and also the latest drivers in the “performance tweaking” part of our series due to be published later on this month.