SimHQ.com - Technology Zone - Preview: Intel Dual-Core Pentium Performance

As previous testing has shown, the IL-2 games thrive on a faster FSB which allows the engine to differentiate itself more than some of the other titles used. At 640x480 there is over a 20% difference in frame rate and the 3.73 maintains that lead through the higher resolutions.

Chaos Theory is the latest in the Splinter Cell series of stealth games. The included Lighthouse demo was used for testing, with sound disabled and the .ini line for hardware shadow mapping set to false to increase the CPU workload.

Chaos Theory

The 840 trails behind the 3.73 by roughly 15% at the lower resolutions, narrowing the performance delta to 10% as the fill rate demands of the higher resolutions shifted the game's bottleneck to the graphics board. With a Radeon X800 XT installed, only the SM 1.1 code path was available, which disabled quite a few of the more advanced graphics options (HDR, tone mapping, etc.).

Call of Duty was configured with its video settings placed at their highest options since the title, based on the aging Quake 3 engine, hardly strains the latest high-end graphics boards. Scores were obtained 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.

Call of Duty

As in the past, Call of Duty appears to benefit more from a faster front-side bus than processor clock speed, so the 3.73's 500MHz clock rate advantage doesn't quite scale the game's performance as far past the 840's as one might expect. And even with the graphics options placed at their highest settings, the game scales very poorly across the tested resolutions on either processor, indicating that the graphics board is hardly stressed by the game using this configuration.

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