Quad Core vs Dual Core: Q9550S vs. E8600, Part III – CPU Scaling with CrossFire
3DMark06
3DMark06 still remains the number one utility used for a system benchmark. The numbers it produces aren’t indicative of real-world gameplay – or any gameplay in general – and for that reason we really dislike using it to compare different systems. However, as long as the rest of the tech world uses it to evaluate gaming performance, we will too. We find that it is mostly useful for tracking changes in a single system, what we are mostly doing now. There are four “mini-games” that it uses for benchmarking graphics, as well as two CPU tests. The scores are “weighed” and added together to give an overall number and there is a further breakdown possible with these mini games that we are charting for you.
Here is a scene from one of the four benchmark “mini games” used to benchmark GPU performance. It will give your PC a real workout even though its default resolution is only 1280×1024.
Here are the results of our 3DMark06 benchmark comparison using the benchmark at its default settings:
Just as in our last testing with single GPUs, we also see almost linear scaling with CPU frequency. If all games are like this, we would all overclock and use quad-core CPUs as it is consistently “outperforms” the Core 2 Duo – even when it is clocked +260 Mhz higher than the Core 2 Quad. Well, now let’s look at the mini-game frame rates:
Here is the identical situation exemplified in the mini-game’s frame rates. ‘Playing’ the 3DMark06 Mini-games would require an overclocked quad core CPU to get the best performance out of our 4870s and then more core speed the better, it appears, so E8600 clocked +260 Mhz higher edges out Q9550s. So, lets move on to to our second synthetic benchmark, Vantage.
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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