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Review: Intel 925X Express Chipset
and Pentium 4 3.4 EE CPU Review
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2
Benchmarks
First up is the Comanche
4 benchmarking demo. Though
several years old, this piece of software has consistently
remained one of the most CPU-limited titles on the market,
refusing to lose more than a few frames even when tested across
a wide range of resolutions. Texture compression and hardware
shaders were checked in the demo’s options.
These scores are roughly 10% slower
than those from the Athlon 64 FX-53’s SimHQ reviewed
earlier this year here but are still amazingly fast when compared
to how the demo ran on hardware available at the time of its
original release.
Lock
On: Modern Air Combat was tested using the MiG-29 Intercept
demo. The in-game settings can be found in the reference files
on the “How SimHQ Tests” page, and this is the rare
title where several settings simply had to be dialed back
a notch or two to avoid unacceptable frame rates. The Intercept
demo was ran until the six minute mark.
Checking the Fraps log shows LOMAC
displaying a trend of below average frame rates while the
MIG-29s are still on the ground, with the frames increasing
to well above average once airborne. In fact, because the
in-flight frames could at times jump so high above the recorded
average, due mostly to low camera angles occurring at several
points throughout the demo, the sustained frame rate for each
resolution should be regarded as roughly 5-7 frames lower
than the average.
Microsoft’s Flight
Simulator 2004 has proven itself to be fairly stressful
on even high-end hardware when its options are dialed to the
max. SimHQ’s custom demo consists of a dusk flight over
Hong Kong, giving a good combination of water, hilly terrain,
and ground structures. The demo is ran with the Spot Plane
view active and the camera set directly behind, and frame
rate recording is halted upon landing. The only in-game option
that isn’t set to its highest option is Ground Scenery
Casts Shadows option, which was disabled.
So small a variation in the frame
rate clearly indicates that the CPU remains the bottleneck
for the game, at least with the settings used during testing.
The IL-2:
Sturmovik Forgotten Battles - Aces Expansion Pack represents
SimHQ’s non-modern flight simulation test. Using OpenGL
rather than D3D, the landscape option was set to perfect.
Testing consisted of using Fraps to record the frame rate
during the first two minutes of the Bf109 Introduction training
demo.
Forgotten Battles scales extremely
well with resolution changes, yet retains playable frame rates
even at the highest resolutions.
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