IL-2: Sturmovik Forgotten Battles – Aces Expansion Pack was tested in OpenGL and with all video options set to medium (normal for Objects detail) using the Black Death track.
For each processor change, IL-2 shows roughly a 5% performance gain for the tested resolutions, with AMD’s latest CPUs hitting a 3-digit frame rate at 640×480.
Falcon 4 performance testing again used the FreeFalcon 3 upgrade mode with SimHQ’s in-house test of a low level, air-to-ground flight that consists of two Falcons using Mk20s and Mavericks. Graphics options, however, were left at their highest settings since the title can hardly be considered as stressful to the test rig’s graphics sub-system.
With the FF3 mode installed, F4 essentially refuses to scale for both resolution change and for the 4000+. For the FX-55’s faster core frequency, however, the game showed a surprising 15% frame rate improvement at 640×480, and settled into roughly 8% for the higher resolutions.
Far Cry is undoubtedly the most graphically advanced title in SimHQ’s benchmark suite. As such, all in-game advanced video options were set at medium. Testing consisted of repeated run-throughs of the Research map in God mode since the level includes an excellent combination of the beach, jungle, and interior settings found throughout the game.
Far Cry displays a performance delta between the tested CPUs of roughly 3-4%, indicating that even with medium graphics settings the title’s frame rate is still possibly limited by the test system’s 9800 Pro, though the scores are certainly much higher compared to when higher in-game settings are enabled.
Developed using id Software’s five-year-old Quake 3 engine, Call of Duty (v1.4) is the second title SimHQ uses testing OpenGL rather than the D3D API. Because the game is based on such an aged engine, graphics settings were left unchanged. Scores were derived from the Dawnville demo using the in-game timedemo utility to capture performance. The “com_maxfps” console command was also used to lift the default frame rate cap of 85.
As usual, Call of Duty scales extremely well with hardware changes. Worth noting is the game appears to benefit more from the FX-55’s clock speed compared to the 4000+’s larger cache.