“Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Intel’s Q9550s vs. E8600, Part Two
CRYSIS
Now we move on to Crysis. It is one of the most demanding games released to date for the PC. Crysis is a science fiction first person shooter by Crytek and published by Electronic Arts in late 2007. Crysisis based in a fictional near-future where an ancient alien spacecraft is discovered buried on an island near the coast of Korea. The single-player campaign has you assume the role of USA Delta Force, ‘Nomad’ in the game. He is armed with various futuristic weapons and equipment, including a “Nano Suit” which enables the player to perform extraordinary feats. Crysis uses DirectX10 for graphics rendering.
A standalone but related game, Crysis Warhead was released September, 2008. It is notable for providing a similar graphical experience to Crysis, but with less graphical demands on the PC at its highest ‘enthusiast’ settings. CryEngine2 is the game engine used to power Crysis and Warheadand it is an extended version of the CryEngine that powers FarCry. As well as supporting Shader Model 2.0, 3.0, and DirectX10’s 4.0, CryEngine2 is also multi-threaded to take advantage of SMP-aware systems. We know it takes advantage of two cores and soon we will see how it does on four-cores. Crysisalso comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and Crytek has developed their own proprietary physics system, called CryPhysics. However, it is noted that actually playing the game is a bit slower than the demo implies.
GPU Demo, Island
All of our settings are set to ‘maximum’ but we do NOT apply any AA/AF in the game. Here is Crysis’ Island Demo benchmarks, at 1920×1200 resolution, and then at 1680×1050.
We sense a disappointment here, perhaps. We see Crysis apparently only uses 2 CPU cores. We confirmed this somewhat also by using Kill-A-Watt to measure our system’s peak wattage and it was 10 watts less usage than with a game that apparently does use all 4 cores. Let’s look at 1650×1080:
Again, E8600 edges out Q9550S. However, the difference is usually by a single frame rate or less. Crysis does not appear to take advantage of Core 2 Quad’s “extra” two cores.
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.