Thread: UT 3, Doom 3 And Company Of Heroes

Today games are the numero uno reason why most of us home users buy fast GPUs and CPUs. Everybody wants their games to look as close to real as pos¬sible and words like realism and immersiveness are becom¬ing regular lingo for any gamer. Developers know this, NVIDIA and ATI know this and so do Intel and AMD. Unfortunately games like Crysis and World In Conflict stress out GPUs more than they stress CPUs and the fastest cards barely choke up 60 fps (30 fps for World In Conflict). Such benchmarks are therefore not very suitable for testing CPUs. From amongst our trio of games, Company Of Heroes was optimised for Intel CPUs and sometimes this becomes very visi¬ble with the tremendous increase in fps over the AMD CPUs. This should be taken with a pinch of salt however, because the differdiffer¬ence will not be as noticeable at higher resolutions and higher
visual settings. For purposes of testing CPUs we intentionally keep settings and resolutions low to allow the processors to scale in performance.



Company Of Heroes threw up some weird scores - not only was a slower clocked AMD tri-core (the Phenom X3 8750) faster than the top-end Phenom X4 9950 but Intel's Q8200 was significantly slower than the cheaper by half E7200. The QX 9770 and QX 9650 remain untouchable across all games. Sadly AMD loses out in VT 3 - developer support does really matter, and for most game devel¬opers jumping on to the leading bandwagon seems the most pru¬dent choice. Doom j was a fantas¬tic engine to benchmark and see¬ing Intel's superiority here just cements their claims; developer support be hanged - the Core 2 Duos and quads are the best CPUs around for discerning garners or anyone who wants maximum eye-<:andy in their games.