Quad Core vs Dual Core: Q9550S vs. E8600, Part III – CPU Scaling with CrossFire
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky
We are now running Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky. The original Shadows of Chernobyl was our previous benchmark and when GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion last year, it naturally become a brand new DX10 benchmark for us. Both games have a non-linear storyline which feature role-playing gameplay elements such as trading and allying with NPC factions. In both games, the player assumes the identity of a S.T.A.L.K.E.R.; an illegal artifact scavenger in “The Zone” which encompasses roughly 30 square kilometers. It is the location of an alternate reality story surrounding the Chernobyl Power Plant after another (fictitious) explosion.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. & Clear Sky feature “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI. S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky uses the X-ray Engine – a DirectX8.1/9/DX10/10.1 Shader model 3.0 & 4.0 graphics engine featuring HDR, parallax and normal mapping, soft shadows, motion blur, weather effects and day-to-night cycles. As with other engines using deferred shading, the original DX9c X-ray Engine does not support anti-aliasing with dynamic lighting enabled. However, the DX10 version does.
Our new 12 minute, stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators is far more detailed and way better than the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. bench we were using previously. As an expansion to the original game, Clear Sky is top-notch and worthy to be S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s successor with even more awesome DX10 effects which help to create and enhance their game’s incredible atmosphere. But DX10 comes with a steep HW requirement and this new benchmark really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings – even below 1650×1080! We pick the most stressful test out of the four that are run by the benchmark. “Sun shafts” approximating a bright sunny morning, brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10 and even DX10.1 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX10.0 with “ultra” settings but did not apply edge detect MSAA which kills performance even further.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Sun shafts” at 1920×1200 and 1650×1800, side-by-side:
Since we do not have CrossFireX-3 benchmarks with E8600, we included all of the benchmarks on one chart for each resolution. We do note that Clear Sky finally runs very well on CrossFireX-3 and with excellent scaling. Another surprise; an engine that takes advantage of multi-core CPU still does not give a big practical advantage over Core 2 Duo! In fact, E8600 at 4.25 Ghz scores about the same as its 4.0 Ghz Core 2 Quad counterpart except in a couple of instances where they trade blows and Q9550S wins. We do see CPU scaling clearly, however.
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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