Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) is a first person shooter running on a custom engine. It has nice graphics but the engine is somewhat dated compared to others and it runs well on modern PCs. It is the first CoD installment to take place in a modern setting instead of in World War II. It differs from the previous Call of Duty games by having a more film-like plot that uses intermixed story lines from two perspectives; that of a USMC sergeant and a British SAS sergeant. There is also a variety of short missions where players control other characters in flashback sequences to advance the story. Call of Duty 4’s move to modern warfare introduced a variety of modern conventional weapons and technologies including plastic explosives.
There are currently about 20 multiplayer maps in CoD4. It is very popular and there is a new expansion for it. CoD Modern Warfare 2 has also just been released and we will soon add it to our benchmark suite. For multiplayer, CoD4 includes five preset classes and introduces the Perks system. Perks are special abilities which allow users to further customize their character to suit their personal style. Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable.
Here are the results at 1920×1200 resolution:
How about almost no variation between the three CPU’s performance? Let’s check out 1680×1050:
We see results similar to Unreal Tournament 3. A popular multiplayer game is very playable even on mid-range graphics cards from the last generation and it plays very smoothly with this generation’s video cards and stock clocked CPUs. This time the frame rates do not even appear to be tied to the CPU’s clockspeed – nor the number of cores with our HD 4870-X2; only slightly more with TriFire. We also note that TriFire does not scale well with this game. All of our tested configurations just breeze through this benchmark.
Nice thorough testing. I think you should consider adding some GTA4 benchmarks to either this or future testing.
Thank-you. Perhaps in future I will add GTA4.
I have switched from Vista 64 to Win 7 64 and I am definitely adding a few new game benchmarks to my benchmarking suite after I am done with my CES articles. The only one that is certain AtM is L4D to replace Lost Coast.
Oh yeh for your charts you also have the 720 listed for all the AMD processors, when I’m sure you meant to say the 550 and 955. I mean I was able to figure out which is which by the X2, X3, and X4, but others might not.
You’re right and thank-you for pointing it out. It is somewhat funny that we all missed it, if quite embarrassing to me.
As soon as I catch up with my other articles on CES and GF-100 Fermi, I will redo those charts. I had a lot of trouble with the site and HTML errors and after they were fixed, this article got really hurried up for publication so as to be published before I left for CES.
The Phenom II CPUs are always in the same order (as determined by X2, X3, and X4):
550-X2
720-X3
955-X4