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

Civilization V

Sid Meier’s Civilization V is our latest benchmark.  We are just now exploring the game – which quite frankly is not our first love.  However, it is a beautiful game that takes advantage of DX11’s tessellation to produce some amazing character models.  There are three benchmarks that can be run from command line and we chose the “unit benchmark” as it looks to be a good CPU test.  You stare out over a vast area completely covered by your forces as they await your commands.

We need to explore this benchmark further as it may support Hyper-Threading which would naturally give an advantage to Intel although it is turned off in our tests.  However, we didn’t find maxed-out details at high resolution and 8xAA to be particularly playable on either platform.