Core i7 vs. Phenom II X2 vs. X4 scaling performance analysis
Serious Sam Second Encounter HD (2010) 
Serious Sam is the title of a series of first-person shooters created by the Croatian development team Croteam. It follows the adventures of its hero Sam “Serious” Stone and his fight against the forces of the extraterrestrial overlord Mental who seeks to destroy humanity. It’s gameplay is a throwback to early first-person shooters like Quake and Doom with the twist of being set in wide-open environments with large groups of enemies attacking at any time, and there are many hidden areas and treasures to find and puzzles to solve.
Serious Sam features cooperative gameplay and allows for split screen action supporting up to 4 players. Serious Sam: The Second Encounter was remade as “HD” using Serious Engine 3. It was released in April, 2010 for PC. Besides updated visuals, new game modes including “Co-op Tournament” and “Survival” for single player, were introduced in this remake. Serious Sam 3 is currently in development by Croteam and is expected to debut at E3, 2011. We use the basic 3 “ultra” presets for benching Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD and then we further fine-tuned the settings to absolute maximum which made the game even more demanding plus 4xAA.
We test first at 2560×1600 resolution:
And now at 1920×1200 with the same completely maxed out ultra presets plus 8xAA:
Finally we test at 1680×1050 with maxed ultra settings plus 8xAA:
Serious Sam: The Second Encounter HD on the Serious 3 engine is quite demanding using the game’s built-in “ultra” presets with its individual settings fully maxed out. Except for the highest resolution with our Phenom II 550 X2 and GTX 480, we see that this game is completely GPU-bound at the fully maxed-out ultra presets that we choose.
Flat-out amazing!!! I’ve never seen anything so epic like this. So, there was not any microstuttering in any of the above games, where the “measured” 40 fps appeared to look more like “perceived” 25 fps? I guess microstuttering is not noticeable if the measured fps is above 70-80, since half of this (45 fps) would still appear to be relatively smooth. Anything below 30 fps becomes really noticeable, so were there ever 40-50 fps instances with 2x 5870 CF that felt like 25fps or so? I’ll take your word for it, if you were actually watching 10,000 hours worth of benchmarking, ha (just kidding, don’t shoot my head off)!
Surprised there are not more comments. For a single video card it does look like a dual core is more than enough. Sure there are a few games that take advantage of four cores, but the fact remains they remain in the minority.
Bobert, I’ve been saying the same thing for months now.
Wow, very thorough and detailed article. It’s one thing to test CPU performance using a single video card, but it must take some brawn to do it for three different video configurations.
There’s so much data here to look at in so many ways. I suppose if you would have included an SLI setup we would then be able to determine how CPU speed affects SLI vs. Crossfire. If I’m looking at this data right, though, it seems Crossfire sees benefits from quad cores more than single video cards do.
Far Cry 2 seems to be a good example of this. Also Far Cry 2 shows interesting relationships between CPU and the GTX 480. The single HD 5870 doesn’t really react to CPU speed and cores the same way dual 5870s and the GTX 480 do. That’s pretty interesting.
So well done. If I only had one suggestion is that I would like to see GTA4 benched, mainly because I own it and good, thorough, and updated benchmarks of it are not easy to come by.:)
Concerning the Far Cry 2 numbers, despite being beaten with faster processors, the HD 5870 paired with the 2.6 dual core is actually outperforming the Crossfire and Nvidia setup. That’s what I find a bit interesting here.
AWESOME REVIEW.
This is EXACTLY what review websites ARE NOT putting out.
A non GPU-bottlenecked review showing how i7 really does have a significant gaming lead over Phenom II.
God you’d be surprised how many AMD fanboys still believe (and spread rumors) that Phenom II is plenty for 5870 crossfire. Psh. Plenty on today’s games maybe, but that is due to the PC gaming community being SNARED by the noob console community and their half a decade old setups.
Ok I’m ranting.
Two Thumbs!!
Raidur means it shows how Phenom II bottlenecks 5870 crossfire.
Everyone knows i7 is faster in games.
PS. I’m not Raidur.
PSS. I’m Raidur.
PSSS. Or am I?
Awesome review GJ.
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