Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II with HD 4870-X2 & TriFire

FarCry 2

Far Cry 2 uses the name of the original Far Cry but it is not connected to the first game as it brings you a new setting and a new story. Ubisoft created it based on their Dunia Engine. The game setting takes place in an unnamed African country, during an uprising between two rival warring factions. Your mission is to kill “The Jackal”; the Nietzsche-quoting mercenary that arms both sides of the conflict that you are dropped into.

The Far Cry 2 game world is loaded in the background and on the fly to create a completely seamless open world. The Dunia game engine provides good visuals that scale well. The Far Cry 2 design team actually went to Africa to give added realism to this game. One thing to especially note is Far Cry 2’s very realistic fire propagation by their engine that is a far cry from the scripted fire and explosions that we are used to seeing.

First we test Far Cry 2 benchmark at 1920×1200 – both of the resolutions we tested at are with AI enabled:

Last time Core i7 was slower when paired with our GTX 280 and a bit faster with the HD 4870-X2 but not enough to make any practical difference. This time Tri-Fire takes advantage of all four cores and the faster clock speed as well as perhaps i7’s hyper-threading except for a few stumbles, here and there at lower clockspeeds. Now let’s check out 1680X1050:

We see the same thing with 1920×1200 as we do with 1680×1050. Both of our graphics configurations can play Far Cry 2 very satisfactorily at the resolutions chosen for them with any CPU including the Phenom II at its stock clock at even the minimum frame rate, although it has a nice increase when it is overclocked. Contrasted with last month’s tests, we see Core i7 920 taking advantage of our fastest graphics.