Quad Core vs Dual Core: Q9550S vs. E8600, Part III – CPU Scaling with CrossFire
Unreal Tournament 3
Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. While many games share the same Unreal 3 engine, the developers can decide how high the system requirements will be by increasing the level of detail. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign.
For our tests, we used the very latest game 2.0 patch for Unreal Tournament 3, released last week with its ‘Titan’ pack. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, however, so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys. Our tests were run at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values. One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built in. This time, we forced 4xAA in Catalyst Control Center. We use the “timedemo-style” of benchmark for UT3 where a demo is recorded in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game.
Containment Demo at 1920×1200:
Wow! Big difference. And now at 1680×1050:
Although our GPUs can easily handle this game with fully maxed out details, quad core simply walks away from its dual counterpart. Quad wins.
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.
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.
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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