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

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea DX10 benchmark

PT Boats: Knights of the Sea is a stand-alone DX10 benchmark utility released by Akella last year. It is actually a tech demo of their upcoming simulation-action game. This DX10 benchmark test runs reliably and apparently provides very accurate and repeatable results.

We set the only settings options available to us as follows:

DirectX Version: DirectX 10
Resolution: 1920×1600 and 1680×1050 at 60 Hz
Image Quality: High
Anti aliasing: 4x

PT Boats DX10 benchmark, first with the HD 4870-x2 at 1920×1200:

Now with the GTX 280 at 1920×1200:

Here is 1680×1050 resolution with HD 4870-X2:

Let’s look at 1680×1050 with the GTX280:

Here with our HD 4870-X2 we see the stock Phenoms lagging badly behind Q9550S – until they are overclocked.  At that point, the Athlon II and Phenom IIs gain the most benefit from overclocking and begin to come very close to our Q9550S overclocked performance; only the Athlon II lags a bit behind the other CPUs.  With our single GPU, GTX 280, there is no practical difference running PT Boats on any CPU except at 1920×1200 when comparing the minimums of the AMD CPUs to the highest Q9550S overclock.