Performance Meets Value – Core i7 vs. Penryn vs. Phenom II
Unreal Tournament 3
Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) is the fourth game in the Unreal Tournament series. UT3 is a first-person shooter and online multiplayer video game by Epic Games. Unreal Tournament 3 provides a good balance between image quality and performance, rendering complex scenes well even on lower-end PCs. Of course, on high-end graphics cards you can really turn up the detail. UT3 is primarily an online multiplayer title offering several game modes and it also includes an offline single-player game with a campaign.
For our tests, we used the very latest game patch for Unreal Tournament 3, released after its ‘Titan’ pack. The game doesn’t have a built-in benchmarking tool, so we used FRAPS and did a fly-by of a chosen level. Here we note that performance numbers reported are a bit higher than compared to in-game. The map we use is called “Containment” and it is one of the most demanding of the fly-bys. Our tests were run at resolutions of 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050 with UT3’s in-game graphics options set to their maximum values.
One drawback of the way the UT3 engine is designed is that there is no support for anti-aliasing built inso we forced 4xAA in each vendor’s control panel. We record a demo in the game and a set number of frames are saved in a file for playback. When playing back the demo, the game engine then renders the frames as quickly as possible, which is why you will often see it playing it back more quickly than you would actually play the game.
Here is Containment Demo, first at 1920×1200 with our two video cards shown side-by-side:
Now at 1680×1050:
There is absolutely no problem playing this game fully maxed out with any of our video cards and with any of our CPUs at our chosen resolutions. We do notice that both overclocking and the amount of cores do make a difference with the Unreal engine; there is good scaling from both overclocking and from moving from tri- to the quad-core CPUs.
Next time, we will include Phenom II 550 X2, 720 X3 and Phenom II 955 X4 so that we can directly compare AMD’s CPU performance in this game.
very thorough and informative, i glanced over it but i will read it later. looking at the graphs and conclusion good stuff look forward to seeing more cpu’s put to the test.
The almost constant flat-lining from the different processors yet again proves the GPU is by far the most important factor for gaming.
I agree that the cpu bottlenecks that people talk about so much are very very overblown.
But they still do matter in gaming. Of course not as much as a video card but they are still very important.
The games you tested are older games. They don’t take use of more than 2 cores decently.
Just about every recent release however is coded to use more than 4 cores. And there are some very LARGE performance differences even when playing at good resolutions and high settings. Recent Source games, Capcom games will make use of more cores because the engines they use have been updated for multi core support.
I’m going to show a couple of examples.
Reisdent Evil 5
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,690488/Processor-benchmarks-with-Resident-Evil-5-Core-i7-reigns-Phenom-strong-Update-Lynnfield-results/Practice/
A 2.4GHz Q6600 beats a 3.0GHz e8400
The 3.1GHz Phenom II X2 550 gets 54.2FPS and the Phenom II X4 945 @ 3.0GHz gets 81.5
The settings were at 1680 x 1050 all settings max.
DiRt 2
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,700780/Dirt-2-CPU-benchmarks-with-DirectX-9-and-DirectX-11-Phenom-doing-well-quad-cores-rule/Practice/
Max Details @ 1680 x 1050
62% increases for Quad Cores over Dual Cores
e8400 @ 3.0GHz gets 37FPS
Q9650 @ 3.0GHz gets 63FPS
Dragon Age Origins
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,698761/Dragon-Age-Origins-CPU-benchmarks-75-percent-boost-for-quad-cores/Practice/
e6600 @ 2.4GHz gets 28FPS vs the Q6600 @ 2.4GHz that gets almost double the fps at 49FPS.
The infamous Grand Theft Auto 4
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,669595/GTA-4-PC-CPU-benchmark-review-with-13-processors/Reviews/?page=2
Prototype
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,688240/Prototype-CPU-Benchmarks-System-Requirements-and-Screenshots/Practice/
Left 4 Dead 2
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,699110/Left-4-Dead-2-CPU-benchmarks-Phenom-II-very-strong/Practice/
ARMA 2
http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,687620/ArmA-2-tested-Benchmarks-with-18-CPUs/Practice/
Batman Arkham Asylum
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum,2465-9.html
All of these games has been tested with high settings at decent and very common gamer resolutions like 1680 x 1050.
There are lots and lots more but I don’t feel like posting any more links. I think that I’m able to make show my point with these games. Just about every recent release comes with great quad core support. I’d be more surprised if a recent game didn’t come out with quad core support.
Thanks for you comments. Let’s look, one at a time at each of your examples:
RE5, they do not test with AA or AF and only at 16×10. Of course, the bottleneck is shifted to the CPU.
Dirt 2, same issues. I test everything with 4xAA/16xAF. The author agrees with me:
” In most systems, especially with DirectX 11, the graphics card is the limiting factor. ”
Prototype. Ph II 940-X4 is barely 3 FPS behind i7. Watch that difference disappear at 19×12 and with faster clocks.
L4D. As with with all Source engine games, the practical difference is minimal. Again, they do not test with AA/AF – which is silly.
ARMA2, I also test; except that I use the highest details and with different results.
Batman AA. Here is what THG concludes:
“We now see that a dual-core Phenom II CPU at 2.5 GHz can handle a minimum frame rate of over 40 FPS. This means that even a sub-$100 CPU should be able to deliver excellent performance with Batman: Arkham Asylum.” Dropping the CPU core speed to 2.0 GHz; why don’t they go to 1 GHz to make a point?
GTA4. They test at 10×12. Ridiculous. Enough said.
You may like Part 2 of my review. It is greatly expanded to include the same 3 CPUs and also now with Ph II 550 X2 and Ph II 955 X4. I am also now testing with HD 4870-X2 and HD 4870-X3 TriFire to up the graphics ante.
It takes me a few weeks to run over 1,000 benchmarks on 17 games for 5 CPUs at three clock speeds and at two resolutions for my upcoming article. –Look for it December 21st.
My test games are certainly not old. However, look for me to add Dragon’s Age: Origins, Left4Dead, Wolfenstein, Borderlands, Dirt2, and CoD MW2 in the coming weeks.
Quad core is becoming more useful for brand new games. Eventually it will be necessary. But not yet.