![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Tuesday , May 19, 2009
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Real World Gameplay CPU Scaling
Four processors; Intel Core i7 920, Intel Core 2 QX9650, AMD Phenom II X4 810, & AMD Phenom II X3 720 BE. Seven games. REAL WORLD GAMEPLAY at stock clocks and all overclocked to 3.6GHz, head to head, & apples to apples.
Left 4 Dead
We are using the Steam download of Left 4 Dead. To determine the best testing sequence for Left 4 Dead, we played through all 4 Films, and all 5 Chapters of each film. In the end, it was the 5th Chapter; "Farmhouse Finale" of the Film "Blood Harvest" that challenged our video cards the most. NOTE: The spawning of zombies, including the special infected, is almost entirely random in Left 4 Dead. Because of this, our framerate graphs will not match up as nicely as we would like them to.
The in-game settings above are common to each CPU.
Highest Playable Settings
Default Frequencies
Quite simply, Left 4 Dead provided very high performance on all CPUs with our Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossFireX configuration. We found the highest in-game settings were playable, and we found 2560x1600 with 12X CFAA and Quality Adaptive AA was playable. We were GPU limited from going up to 24X CFAA with Quality Adaptive AA.
None of the CPUs at default frequencies resulted in any gameplay experience differences. There were some framerate differences, but they weren’t that different really at these clock speeds.
Highest Playable Settings
Overclocked
Overclocking our CPUs did not yield any difference in the gameplay experience, we are still graphics limited at these settings. Again we did not find that much difference in performance between each CPU at these settings.
Apples to Apples
For our apples-to-apples testing we disabled AA, which removes us from being GPU dependent and moves us towards being CPU dependent in this game.
Intel vs. AMD Overclocked at 3.6GHz
At these settings we definitely see some performance differences between the CPUs when overclocked. The Intel Core i7 920 and Intel Core 2 QX9650 are close in performance, but the two AMD CPUs are slower. The Phenom II X3 720 BE was the slowest here, if you want to say 160 FPS is slow.
Intel
We see a similar pattern here as we have in every game except GTA4, the Intel Core i7 920 gains the most performance advantage by overclocking having the largest overclock of 1GHz.
AMD
Again, we find the AMD Phenom II X4 810 results in a large performance increase by overclocking it to 3.6GHz.