Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire
S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky
Prologue: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky became a brand new DX10 benchmark for us when GSC Game World released a prequel story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl, last year. Both games have non-linear storylines which feature role-playing game elements. 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 about 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 features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI. It 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, although the DX10 version does.
We are using the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. 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 already incredible atmosphere. Unfortunately, DX10 comes with steep hardware requirements and this new game really needs multi-GPU to run at its maximum settings. We picked the most stressful test out of the four, “Sun shafts”. It brings the heaviest penalty due to its extreme use of shaders to create DX10/DX10.1 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX10.0 with “ultra” settings plus 4xAA, but did not apply edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further.
We present S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Clear Sky DX10 benchmark “Sun shafts” at 1920×1200:
Now at 1680×1050:
We do not see much variance in frame rates anywhere. Only a few frames per second separate the fastest CPU from the slowest one although you might want to be over 3.0 GHz. The biggest differences are generally at the maximum which makes zero difference to the playing experience. Practically there is no real difference gained with any CPU; the video card will make the most difference with Clear Sky’s performance. We also see Tri-Fire also having issues with the minimums in some cases.
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