Quad Core vs Dual Core: Q9550S vs. E8600, Part III – CPU Scaling with CrossFire
by apoppin on Mar.20, 2009, under Articles, Technology
Lost Planet DX10 benchmark
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition is a Capcom port of an Xbox 360 game which became the first DX10 game. It takes place on the icy planet of E.D.N. III which is filled with monsters, pirates, big guns, and huge bosses. This frigid world makes a great environment to highlight the benefits of high dynamic range lighting (HDR) as the snow-white environment reflects blinding sunlight, while DX10 particle systems toss snow and ice all around. The game looks great in both DirectX 9 and 10 and there isn’t really much of a difference between the two versions except perhaps shadows. Unfortunately, the DX10 version doesn’t look that much better when you’re actually playing the game and the DX10 version still runs slower than the DX9 version.
There are two versions of this benchmark. One was released as a stand-alone demo and the other is in-game. We chose the in-game demo from the retail copy of Lost Planet and updated through Steam to the latest version for our benchmark runs. This run isn’t completely scripted as the bugs spawn and act a little differently each time you run the demo. The benchmark is more of a scripted flyby of the level with “noclip” turned on. This means the benchmark won’t make an absolutely perfect comparison between different hardware setups, even with identical game settings. So we ran it many times. Lost Planet’s Snow and Cave demos are run continuously in-game and blend into each other.
Here are our benchmark results with the more demanding, Snow. All settings are fully maxed out in game including 4xAA/16xAF – first at 1920×1200 resolution:
And Now at 1680×1050:
Clock speed is king here. Here you want to keep either of your CPUs over 4 Ghz to avoid falling below 30 FPS, often accepted by gamers as an acceptable minimum.
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March 21st, 2009 on 5:42 pm
Great article. Here’s what I found most interesting
If we just look at the minimum framerates for the chips are similar clockspeeds (Q9550s @ 3.4 vs E8600 @ 3.33 and Q9550s @ 4.0 vs E8600 @ 4.0) the quad core comes out on top the majority of the time.
For the two-way Xfire tests, the Q9550 (at similar clockspeed to) beats the E8600’s minimum framerates in COD4, UT3, Lost Planet, HL2: LC, FEAR, ET: QW, WiC, FC2, and PT Boats. The two chips, for the most part, tie in the games Stalker, Crysis, and X3. The only game where the quad loses is Call of Juarez.
When we look at the three-way XFire tests, the results are basically the same except Lost Planet and PT Boats moves from the “win” category to the “tie” category for the quad core.
I wonder what’s up with the Call of Juarez results. Even with the chips at the same clock speed, the quad core loses fairly significantly. At 4.00 GHz, the quad’s minimum framerate is 31 while the dual’s is 42.
March 21st, 2009 on 5:59 pm
I wondered about CoJ as i was testing and repeated those benchmarks many, many times; far more than with any other of my tests. I would say that some of it is probably partly because of the Cat 9-2 drivers. If you look back on this benchmark to our September testing with Cat 8-1 all the way through Cat 8-12hotfix, there is definitely some variance with multi-GPU performance.
So let me theorize that there appears to be a ‘hitch’ in CoJ – you can actually watch it “stutter” in a couple of places – that the slower clocked Quad simply cannot overcome that appear to really skew the bottom [and thus average and max] framerates. It exaggerates what happens when you actually play CoJ, similar to my old STALKER benches that had way too high of a maximum as they panned the sky. The CoJ benchmark was also never updated, although the game was. That makes it somewhat flawed in my opinion, as the vendors are continuing to optimize for the game, not for the old benchmark. In the future, it will not be so important – as for example, in my current benching, “Vista 64 vs. Vista32-bit”, my Q9550s is at 4.0Ghz where this is not observed quite so much.
It also means that I am considering making a custom timedemo from the latest patched CoJ. I wish Techland would update theirs. Or maybe I will wait for “CoJ 2, Bound in Blood” and use that new benchmark instead. I am looking forward to its release, soon.
http://www.nugadgets.com/products/ProductDetails/68514Call_of_Juarez_2_PC.1496901.1.html
they say 1-3 weeks, but that is not official. The trailer says, “Summer”.
Here is a trailer on You.Tube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CZi_FKsyPE
You also need to realize that CrossFireX-3 is still imperfect; you can see it’s scaling is still not “bang-for-buck”. Clearly there has been drastic improvements overall in the CFX-3 Catalyst drivers over the last 6 months, but there is plenty of room for more.
March 21st, 2009 on 9:18 pm
Yep, I can’t wait to see how multi-core CPUs and GPUs take off this year. Check out the following results for the new Tom Clancy game:
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,679029/Tom-Clancys-HAWX-Benchmark-review-with-15-CPUs/Practice/
Those were some of the most striking results I’ve come across yet – even more striking than GTA4.
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