Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under and DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded on the Harbor map which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game.

For our testing, we set all the settings to High. Because of how intense the game is, we tested with both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050 for the time being. There is currently no support for anisotropic filtering in the game, but you can still force it from the driver control panel.

Crysis - GeForce GTX 280

1680x1050 0AA 0AF, All High Settings

• Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 OC (2x4GHz, 1333MHz FSB)
• AMD Athlon X2 7750 OC (2x3.1GHz, 1.8GHz HTT)
• AMD Athlon X2 7750 BE (2x2.7GHz, 1.8GHz HTT)
• Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 (2x2.5GHz, 800MHz FSB)
• AMD Phenom X3 8450 (3x2.1GHz, 1.8GHz HTT)
• AMD Athlon X2 7550 (2x2.5GHz, 1.8GHz HTT)
• AMD Athlon X2 6000+ (2x3.1GHz, 1.0GHz HTT)
• AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2x2.7GHz, 1.0GHz HTT)
• AMD Athlon X2 4850e (2x2.5GHz, 1.0GHz HTT)

• 37.9
• 30.7
• 29.6
• 28.7
• 27.8
• 27.1
• 26.6
• 25.2
• 21.7

0

10

20

30

40

Frames Per Second - higher is better

In [i]Crysis the heavily overclocked Intel E5200 stretches out a huge lead over the rest of the pack, and subsequently hits higher on the value graph as well, like we'd expect. The overclocked AMD Athlon X2 7750 BE stretches out a bit of a lead from its non-overclocked status but it's not by a large amount and adds little to the value. However when both are not overclocked the Athlon X2 7750 BE CPU is in a better position than the Intel E5200.

Despite hitting mid table, the Phenom tri-core falls into quite bad value as its quite high price of over $100 compared to the rest of the CPUs doesn't yield the same sort of performance increase.

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.

The game uses DirectX 10.1 to improve anti-aliasing performance and quality. The improvements are made by reading the multisampled depth buffer in a single pass - something that was only introduced officially with DirectX 10.1. However, Ubisoft has also made the enhancements available to Nvidia hardware as well through a DirectX 10 extension.

We used a retail version of the game and the in-built gameplay demo set to Ultra-Very High settings under DirectX 10.



The Far Cry 2 performance is clearly very good for the Intel E5200, but the Athlon X2 7750 BE is not far behind and because it's cheaper it offsets the Intel's slight performance advantage as both of them are parallel to the green area. The low native performance of the Intel E5200 actually puts it quite close to the red, whereas the dual core AMDs general form a nice trend down the middle. Again, the Phenom X3 8450 sits near the red though - its low clock speed affording just mediocre performance for its higher price.

Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Valve

Valve's epic new Zombie co-op shooter, Left 4 Dead, adds cutting edge new features to the Source engine, like subtle motion blur and film grain post processing when set to Very High detail which we've tested at. We also enabled multi-core processing and disabled VSync in the in-game options.



In Left 4 Dead again both overclocks perform fantastically, yielding quite a bit of extra performance - especially for the Intel E5200 which again goes from red value to strongly green. While the AMD overclock isn't quite as impressive it still yields good value because it costs a bit less, although the Intel is still "greener".