Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Crysis is seen by many as the poster boy for DirectX 10 and it will make your system quite literally fall over crying if it's not up to – it’s a monster of an engine! It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then, that the graphics are something special – they’re above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a PC game even still. We used the latest 1.21 patch and range the game in 64-bit and DirectX 10 mode in a custom level run through.


While the field is stretched out by only a small margin, the Phenom II X4 955 snuggles up close to the Core i7-920, whereas the 945 with DDR3 falls slightly below the 940 running DDR2, but it's only by less than half a frame per second. However, despite the fact that both of these are 3GHz quad cores, the 940 is running not only "slower" DDR2, but also only a 1.8GHz northbridge clock, compared to 1,333MHz DDR3 and a 2.0GHz northbridge on the 945.

Is the DDR2 simply more efficient? After all, despite the large memory clock difference the Core i7 has three channels of DDR3 to take advantage of. Clearly memory isn't being used much and a high core IPC is what's needed here. Crysis doesn't even take that much advantage of the extra cores either, with the E8500 dual core stomping up the rankings as well.

Far Cry 2

Publisher: Ubisoft

Far Cry 2 is the latest first person shooter from Ubisoft, and while it continues the Far Cry franchise that Crytek started in 2004, this game is built on its own in-house engine and has no association - other than its name - to anything Crytek has worked on or is working on now. We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to High-Very High settings under DirectX 10.


While the Core i7 920 sits low down our table - something Intel disputes with us. but our results have always been consistent, even across motherboards and memory types with the CPU - the Phenom II 945 and 955 come out leading the tables by a frame per second or so over the Intel quad cores, Q9550 and Q9400, as well as the fastest Intel dual core processor.

DDR3 and CPU clock clearly makes a difference here and, what's more, a higher core count leads to more performance on the AMD front as well. With that said, it's "only" four to five frames per second at a smooth 60FPS.