Gaming: Far Cry, FEAR and Call of Duty 2
Since AMD is launching its first FX processor using dual cores, I felt it an obvious choice to benchmark some of the latest titles to see if the FX-60 can outperform the FX-55 — a single core processor running at 200 MHz faster clock speed.
Games benchmarked were Far Cry, FEAR and Call of Duty 2. I ran them at the same resolutions that we run them in during our GPU tests, as no doubt anyone buying a $1000 CPU is going to have a very nice GPU as well. I did leave AA and AF disabled, however.
I also decided to use NVIDIA’s 82.12 Beta drivers that enabled dual-core processor support as well as using the SMP patch from Call of Duty 2 available at http://www.callofduty.com/patch_cod2/ .
Looking at just the average frame rates, you can see that the FX-60 does not have a significant gain in performance over the FX-55; in fact there is really no noticeable gain at all. At first that might sound pretty negative, but figuring the FX-60 has a 200 MHz clock deficit, and that no titles have had multi-threading implemented for any amount of time, the fact that we didn’t LOSE performance should be a positive indication for the future.
On both Far Cry and Call of Duty 2, we did see a slight increase in the minimum frame rate, the second most important number on these graphs. If dual-core CPUs can help keep these numbers higher, then multi-threading games might well be worth the extra effort they take to code.
But for now, the naming of this CPU the “FX-60” is a bit deceptive if AMD plans to continue their gaming enthusiast mantra for the FX line.
