Intel Core i7-970 Processor Review, Lower Cost 6-Core
Low-Res Gaming: Crysis and ETQW
For our next set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Crysis and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. When testing processors with Crysis or ET:QW, we drop the resolution to 800x600, and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for the games' physics engines and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.
|
|
|
There really isn't much more to say here than the graphs don't already tell you. When a game is CPU bound, as is the case in our low resolution testing here, the Core i7-970 slots itself right in behind the Core i7-980X. However, if we turned up the eye candy, resolution and pixel processing with anti-aliasing etc., the graphics processors will become the limiting factor and within a certain range, performance won't very much between the CPUs. On the other hand, if you look at the variance between an AMD six-core and the new Core i7-970, at almost 2X in some cases, the margin of CPU processing horsepower advantage is hard to ignore.
