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

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat

S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat became a new DX11 benchmark for us after GSC Game World released a another story expansion to the original Shadows of Chernobyl. It is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series. All of these 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., Call of Pripyat features “a living breathing world” with highly developed NPC creature AI. Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully intregrated. Call of Pripyat is also compatible with DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1. It uses the X-ray 1.6 Engine one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tesselation– a 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 and DX 11 versions do.

We are using the stand-alone “official” benchmark by Clear Sky’s creators. Call of Pripyat is top-notch and worthy to be part of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R’s universe with even more awesome DX11 effects which help to create and enhance their game’s already incredible atmosphere. As with Clear Sky before it, DX10 and now DX11 comes with steep hardware requirements and this new game still 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 and DX11 effects. We ran this benchmark fully maxed out in DX11.0 with “ultra” settings plus 4xAA, including applying edge-detect MSAA which chokes performance even further.

Here we present our maxed out DX11 settings for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Call of Pripyat DX11 benchmark with 4xAA at 1920×1200:

Now we move on to 1680×1050 with 4xAA:

Here we see the Phenom II quad-core trade blows with the Core i7-920 with the dual-core not far behind except at the highest resolution with HD 5870 CrossFire.  Again, we have managed to shift the load to the GPU with such high details and anti-aliasing applied.  We do see HD 5870 CrossFire providing a relatively smooth experience at 1680×1050 with all of our CPUs and at all three chosen core speeds.  Clearly Phenom II 550 X2 is sufficient to provide as good an experience in this case as the much more expensive Core i7-920 CPU.