CrossFireX and the Phenom II X4 940 – Competitive or Not?

Far Cry 2

This is another highly awaited title from last year that has beautiful graphics, an open ended environment, and is fun to play... but the traveling between missions tends to get repetitive. If you dial up the graphics options, the game rewards with you some fantastic visuals courtesy of the Dunia Engine. The game also features the most impressive benchmark tool we have seen in a PC game. We set the performance feature set to Very High, graphics to High, and enable DX10 with AA set to 2x. The in-game benchmark tool is utilized with the Ranch Small level.

We learned two things about this game. It favors the Intel platforms, and once you provide enough GPU horsepower, the i7 is untouchable. This is especially true once the i7 is overclocked. Although not shown, our single card results with the i7 at 4.00GHz resulted in an average frame rate of 68.8 with the minimum at 54.2 and maximum at 106.2. Single card results with the Q9550 and Phenom II 940 overclocked only increased frame rates by 1fps. If you wanted to pick a single benchmark and show a large disparity in gaming performance between the Intel and AMD platforms, this is the one to use. We would highly suggest to AMD that they send an engineer to UbiSoft for game engine optimizations.

In the 1680x1050 single card tests, the Intel platforms are slightly ahead of the AMD setup; even minimum frame rates favor Intel in this game. Enable CrossFire and we see the Q9550 leading the Phenom II 940 by 7% with minimum frame rates being equal. The i7 CrossFire results are impressive with a 31% frame rate increase over the Q9550 and 41% over the Phenom II 940. Once we overclock our processors, scores improve for the Q9550 and Phenom II 940 with frame rates increasing 22% and 20% over stock CF numbers respectively. The i7 shows a similar 19% increase when overclocked. Even though the Q9550 has a 7% clock speed advantage over the Phenom II 940, frame rates improve by 17% in the overclocked CrossFire results.

Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 5% and minimum frame rates less than 1% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 12% in average frame rates and minimum frame rates actually decrease by 5%. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 42% and minimum rates increase 15%. Overclocking our processors resulted in an 19%~22% average improvement in average frame rates with the Q9550 benefiting the most.

At 1920x1200, the benchmarks reveal nothing new between the platforms. The Phenom II 940 is competitive with a single card, trails the Q9550 by 8% in CrossFire and 9% when overclocked, even though we start to become CPU/GPU limited on these two platforms. The Q9550 does hold a 17% advantage in minimum frame rates in the overclocked tests. The i7 is just stupid fast compared to our other two platforms with its standard CrossFire results being 8% and 18% faster than the overclocked Q9550 and Phenom II 940 processors respectively. Overclocking the i7 puts it in another league altogether.

Adding a second card for CrossFire operation improves average frame rates by 12% and minimum frame rates decrease by 8% for the Phenom II. The Intel Q9550 has an improvement of 18% in average frame rates and minimum frame rates do not change. The Core i7 average frame rates improve by 53% and minimum rates increase 26%. Overclocking our processors resulted in a 22%~26% average improvement in average frame rates with the Q9550 benefiting the greatest.

When it comes to game play experience and not benchmark tests, all three platforms responded the same at our specified settings. We did not notice any advantages with the improved frame rates that the i7 offers over the other two platforms. However, with the i7 we could change the graphic settings to Very High and increase AA to 4x and still experience very good game play. It was as if nothing changed except now we were looking at the savannahs of Africa in a much better way. These same settings were not always a pleasant experience on the other two platforms during heavy action scenes, but the game remained playable for the most part.