Intel Mobile Core 2 Duo - Merom Debuts
Some may consider 3DMark06 scores to be a bit nebulous relative to any sort of real-world gaming performance assessment, so we then fired up the Id's venerable Quake 4 engine for some straight forward frame rate recording with our various Intel mobile processors in the socket.
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;) Quake 4 |
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First we tested various Core Duo and Core 2 Duo mobile processors in what by all rights should be considered a CPU-limited test methodology. Low quality special effects and image quality were selected and a low resolution of 640x480 was set. The results were surprising to say the least...
The moral of the story here? You simply don't need a ton of CPU power to run Quake 4 at reasonable frame-rates; you need GPU power. For example, with a GeForce 7900 GTX powering the graphics pipeline, a Core 2 Duo E6700 chalks up around 190 fps in this testing scenario.
At higher resolutions and image quality, the results scale accordingly and with almost identical variance between each mobile processor type that was utilized in the CPU socket.
