Core i7 vs. Phenom II X2 vs. X4 scaling performance analysis

Just Cause 2

Just Cause 2 is a 2010 sandbox-style action video game by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios and Eidos Interactive and is the sequel to the 2006 video game, Just Cause. Just Cause 2 employs the Avalanche Engine 2.0 which an updated version of the engine used in the original and there are impressive visuals as it is made just for DX10. It is set on the fictional tropical island of Panau in Southeast Asia. Rico Rodriguez returns as the protagonist who aims to overthrow the evil dictator “Baby” Panay and also to confront his former boss, rogue agent Tom Sheldon.

The game play is similar to that of its predecessor in that the player is free to roam the huge open world without a need to focus on the storyline. The Just Cause 2 AI has been rewritten to use a planning system which enables the in-game enemies to do more and there is also more vertical game play as well as a manual aiming system that allows the player to target enemy NPC’s specific limbs. Just Cause 2 also includes an adaptive difficulty system which scales as the player progresses. There are also new weapons in Just Cause 2 which include launching laser-controlled rockets as well as several new vehicles including a Boeing 737. Just Cause 2 now includes dual-grappling hooks which give players the ability to tether unlimited objects to each other including the tethering of enemies to vehicles and to each other which works very well as one of your goals is to cause maximum chaos. It is a lot of fun!

Here are the maximum settings available to a GeForce card; the bottom two, the Bokeh Filter and GPU water simulation, are unavailable to Radeons and they are left off on all runs to give solid apples-to-apples comparisons for all of our tested video cards and we used the Dark Tower benchmark built into the retail game.

First the benches at 2560×1600:

Now let’s look at the performance at 1920×1200:

Finally we test at 1680×1050.

At the highest resolution and with HD 5870 CrossFire, we see very little performance difference with our Core i7-920 at any tested core speed.  The Phenom II 955 X-4, and to a lesser extent the 550 X2, at 3.8 GHz matches it but then has a steep performance drop off as they are underclocked. A similar thing occurs at the lower resolutions but it is not as severe a performance dropoff.  The GTX 480 performs similarly but with an even less-steep penalty to decreasing core speed, becoming more noticeable as the resolution is decreased and the HD 5870 shows the least change with CPU core speed increases.  We do see that quad-core is a bit faster generally than the dual-core and that the Core i7 is quickest with our two fastest graphics configurations.