“Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Intel’s Q9550s vs. E8600, Part Two
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea DX10 benchmark
PT Boats: Knights of the Seais a stand-alone DX10 benchmark utility released by Akella, last year. It is a benchmark-friendly 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 at 1920×1200:
PT Boats DX10 benchmark at 1650×1080:
We see really mixed results as no one is probably optimizing for this yet as it is unreleased. But generally we see CPU scaling although we do not see any real advantage to 4 cores over two in this benchmark yet. We are really looking forward to this game’s release, later this year.
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.