IL-2: 1946 is a compilation release of all of Maddox Games’ “Sturmovik” simulations over the last several years. While quickly aging, the title is still very popular among flight sim enthusiasts, particularly for its online play. The title was configured to run in OpenGL mode and its Kamikaze02 track used for this article’s testing.
The engine used for IL-2 demonstrated substantial gains from Intel’s Core 2 Duo architecture when initially tested in 2006 and that performance advantage shows here again against the two Phenom processors, with the Q9450 pulling ahead of the X4 9850 by a solid 25%. The new Phenom in turn outperformed its older sibling by roughly 10% in both test settings.
GTR2 was tested with a custom recording of a crowded grand prix track. The title’s configuration tool was used to enable its DX9 profile.
The Q9450’s trend of dominating AMD’s Phenom in SimHQ’s benchmark suite continues on with GTR2, though the X4 9850 comes within roughly 90% of the Intel part’s frame rate under the higher tested setting.
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (GRAW2) was tested via repeated run-throughs of the middle portion of the title’s first mission.
GRAW2 sees a stronger flattening of scores across the tested processors than most of the other applications used for this article. The tactical shooter’s use of certain graphics features places more of the performance burden on the installed GPU, seeing a smaller variance among the recorded frame rates at the higher resolution and settings.