Test Results – Real World
Moving onto real world applications, Microsoft’s FSX Acceleration, the first retail expansion to FSX, was recently released and has continued to display very CPU-limited performance characteristics. An Airtrike Ultralight was flown over Rio de Janeiro on a clear afternoon at roughly 5k elevation using a recorded free flight.
The low test setting sees virtually no variance between all three processor speeds, while the higher setting shows the overclocked QX9650 pulling out a small win.
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 QX9770 outperforms the QX9650 at stock by almost 10% at the low setting, yet once overclocked the QX9650 sees an almost 15% gain over its default speed. The high setting still sees a noticeable performance improvement from overclocking, with a frame rate gain of 10%. The QX9770 loses in both settings to the overclocked part, so raw clock speed definitely benefits this sim.