Gaming Tests
Our gaming tests set out to find games that were heavily CPU dependent in order to test for platform differences. Games at higher resolutions with more emphasis on the GPU won’t show us any differences, if they exist.
FEAR v1.03
We ran FEAR at 1024×768 with the CPU settings at maximum and the GPU settings at medium to show any performance differences off of the GPU.
Call of Duty 2 v1.01
We ran CoD2 at 1024×768 with the GPU settings at Medium.
3DMark06 v1.02
This benchmark is used by many in the enthusiast crowd to compare their systems so we decided it would be good for our readers if we included numbers from our test system here as well.
FEAR and Call of Duty see no gains going from a dual-core processor to a quad-core processor, and in reality, I didn’t expect anything of the sort. Even today, games that utilize two threads for processing are incredibly rare and the move to more than two threads will not be quick; though it will be faster than the move to two thread support.
FutureMark’s 3DMark06 benchmark though does use multi-threading for its CPU tests, that are weighted in on the overall score. The overal 3DMark score is about 7% higher on the Intel QX6700 system, though the CPU test results show 84% and 66% faster frame rates respectively. This goes to show that if gaming does move to multiple threads, as Intel and others are hoping and pushing for, then processors like the QX6700 will get a good workout!
