Introducing the New Phenom II 980 BE vs. Core i7-920 – value meets performance again

Mafia II

Mafia II is a third-person action-adventure video game which is the sequel to Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven. It is developed by 2K Czech and is published by 2K Games and was released last year. Mafia II is set from 1943 to 1951 in Empire Bay which is a fictional city based mostly on San Francisco and New York City along with some influences from Chicago and also Detroit.

Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II veteran Vito Scaletta who joins the Falcone Crime Family and becomes a ‘made’ man. There are 15 chapters in the game and over two hours of game engine generated cutscenes. Mafia II makes extensive use of Nvidia’s PhysX whose full effects are seen smoothly only by playing on a PhysX-enabled GeForce and preferably with a second video card dedicated to it.

For this article, we used the full retail game with Mafia II’s built-in benchmark with the highest settings for 5760×1080, 2560×1600 and 1920×1200 – without PhysX.

We see the stronger performance advantage of the Core i7-920 disappear as the resolution goes up and way up.  There is not much difference playing at 2560×1600 or at 5760×1080 and either CPU platform gives an almost identical playing experience.

This covers our DX9 games. Let’s move on to DX10 and DX11 games to see if anything changes.   So far, the Phenom II X4 980 BE is keeping up pretty well with the Core i7-920.