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 fairly significant performance lead for Intel’s new processor at the lowest setting, which outscored the previous generation quad core by roughly 15% and the dual core by almost 45%. At higher in-game settings, however, the title’s use of certain graphics features such as bloom shifted the performance onus onto the installed video card and we see very little performance difference at 1280×1024.
Call of Duty 2 was tested using a custom demo recording from the Prisoners of War single-player mission.
Almost two years old and coded in a way as to not take advantage of additional cores, Call of Duty 2 showed only a few frames of difference between the tested CPUs across all settings. We’ll probably retire this title from our benchmark suite soon for something a bit newer, such as Call of Duty 4 or Crysis.
World in Conflict is a new addition to SimHQ’s benchmark suite. The title includes an in-game benchmark scenario with a high level of detail being rendered that, combined with its physics, makes it a solid CPU test.
The QX9650 shows a noteworthy frame rate gain over the older QX6850, with both quad cores outperforming the dual-core E6850 under all test settings.