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

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry 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. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 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. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 with our HD 4870-X2 – all resolutions tested are with AI enabled:

Now with the GTX 280 at 1920×1200:

Now at 1680×1050; first with the HD 4870-X2:

Now with our GTX 280 at 1680×1050:

Both of our video cards can play Far Cry 2 very satisfactorily at the resolutions chosen for them with any CPU except for the Athlon II at its stock clock at the minimum. Here we see scaling and the number of CPU cores come into play.  The slower overclocked 720 X3 at 3.5 GHz does a bit better than the faster overclocked Athlon II and Phenom II and the Q9550s at 4.0 GHz pulls away from the crowd in the minimums and averages with our HD 4870-X2.

On the other hand, we see the results much closer with our GTX 280 and this time our Phenom II 720 X3 trades blows with the 4.0 GHz Q9550S and even beats it in the minimums and averages.  Even the Athlon II and Phenom II occasionally pass the Q9550S!