Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire
ARMA 2
ARMA 2 is our newest benchmark and it is taken from the third installment in their series of realistic modern military simulation games from Bohemia Interactive. It features a player-driven story with more than 70 weapons and over 100 different vehicles. With a game world of 225 square km that is taken from actual surveillance photos, you can expect truly massive online battles with five distinct armed groups to choose from. ARMA2 can be considered a tactical shooter where the player commands a squad of AI – or many squads – with elements of real-time tactics.
ARMA 2 Demo was released in late June, 2009 and coming in at 2.6 GB, the ARMA 2 demo allows you to experience the same game play that is featured in the full version of ARMA 2 – including multiplayer, as well as a few of the vehicles, weapons and units. The ARMA2 demo also contains a part of Chernarus terrain, a small section of the full game world set in the fictional “Black Russia”. There is also a massive performance hit on any platform when maximum details are enabled at the resolutions that we test; AA is set to “high”.
Here are our results at 1920×1200 resolution:
Clockspeed clearly matters, but only by a frame per second or two. Let’s look at 16×10:
It no longer appears that there is anything more than just frame rate scaling tied to CPU core speed; the number of CPU cores do not appear make a real difference. In this case, our Q9550S beats Core i7 in most of the testing and the Phenom II hangs right in with the Intel CPUs.
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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