The Dark Knight: Intel's Core i7
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on November 3, 2008 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
We have already teased you with the results of our gaming benchmarks, but sometimes charts are easier to look at than tables. I should stress that to get any of these modern games to be even remotely CPU bound I had to drop resolution and image quality, which is fine for this as we're trying to evaluate whether or not Nehalem is architecturally faster. In the real world however, you'll not see any performance difference in any of these titles with Nehalem over Penryn.
We start off with our Age of Conan benchmark. This is a fraps test, we take our character and swim him to shore and back measuring performance during the process.
Note that to get this game to be at all CPU bound we had to drop to medium quality and run at 1280 x 1024:
This is the only game where we see Nehalem boast such a tremendous performance advantage. I suspect that it's extremely sensitive to memory latency for some reason, resulting in the i7-920 being faster than the QX9770.
Our GRID benchmark is a fraps test that measures frame rate at the very beginning of a race with our car starting at the back and then crashing into a wall:
While racing games are usually great physics tests, GRID just wasn't CPU bound enough to show serious differences between the CPUs. Nehalem and Penryn are basically no different here.
For Crysis we ran the built in CPU2 benchmark on version 1.21 of the game:
Like GRID, Nehalem offers nothing over Penryn in the performance department.
Far Cry 2's built in benchmark tool using the Ranch small test brings us our next set of numbers:
Here we have another game that favors the Core i7's architecture, but as we just saw it's not an across the board sort of win as some games miss Penryn's larger L2 cache.
Our last benchmark is a walk towards Megaton in Fallout 3:
The edge goes to Intel's Core i7 once again.
Overall in gaming tests the situations where Nehalem was faster than Penryn outnumbered those where it didn't, but upgrading to Nehalem for faster gaming performance doesn't make sense. We were entirely too GPU bound in all of these titles, if you want Nehalem it should be because of its performance elsewhere.
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Jingato - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
If the 920 can easily be overclocked to 3.8Ghz on air, what intensive is there to purchase the 965 for more that triple the price?TantrumusMaximus - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
I don't understand why the tests were on such low resolutions... most gamers are running higher res than 1280x1024 etc etc....What gives?
daniyarm - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Because if they ran gaming benchmarks at higher res, the difference in FPS would be hardly visible and you wouldn't go out and buy a new CPU.If they are going to show differences between Intel and AMD CPUs, show Nehalem at 3.2 GHz vs 9950 OC to 3.2 GHz so we can see clock for clock differences in performance and power.
npp - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
9950 consumes about 30W more at idle than the 965XE, and 30W less under load. I guess that OC'ing it to 3,2Ghz will need more than 30W... Given that the 965 can process 4 more threads, I think the result should be more or less clear.tim851 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Higher resolutions stress the GPU more and it will become a bottleneck. Since the article was focussing on CPU power and not GPU power they were lowering the resolution enough to effectively take the GPU out of the picture.Caveman - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would be nice to see these CPU reviews use relevant "gaming" benchmarks. It would be good to see the results with something like MS flight simulator FSX or DCS Black Shark, etc... The flight simulators these days are BOTH graphically and calculation intensive, but really stress the CPU.AssBall - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
No, they don't, actually.philosofool - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
It would have been nice to see a proper comparison of power consumption. Given all of Intel's boast about being able to shut off cores to save power, I'd like to see some figures about exact savings.nowayout99 - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Ditto, I was wondering about power too.Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, November 3, 2008 - link
Soon, soon my friend :)-A