CPU Reviews & Articles

Company of Heroes Performance

Company of Heroes is yet another new addition to our CPU benchmark suite, and as a newer game, it offers one of the most demanding benchmark environments ever. CoH is a WW2 real-time strategy game, which again provides us with a nice change of pace from the usual FPS benchmark. We use the game's built-in performance test for all of our benchmarking. To give our AMD and Intel processors a viable test, we've increased the physics load, while dropping many of the graphics settings. This will help provide a more CPU-specific benchmark test, while ensuring that the graphics card is not the limiting factor.

Company of Heroes is another recent addition to our processor benchmarking suite, and its included performance test can bring even high-end systems to their knees. Like F.E.A.R., CoH can be custom tuned for either processor or graphics testing, highlighting one over the other, while maintaining the game engine and testing methodology. The results are almost a duplicate of the F.E.A.R. chart, with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ owning the top AMD score, but not even close to the Core 2-based processors.

Prey Performance

Prey is a serious first-person shooter from Human Head Studios and 3D Realms that uses a heavily modified version of the DOOM 3 engine. You take the role of Earth's savior in an all-out war against some very nasty alien invaders, all within a Matrix-like experience, and with some of the best computer game graphics you'll ever see. Our Prey benchmark is also a very serious game test that can push any system to its limits.

Unfortunately, the Prey benchmark results are indicative of this very demanding game environment, and are bunched very close together. This is similar to other high-end SM3.0 games, which even at low resolutions, can still be very dependent on the graphics card.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory Performance

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is another in a long line of third-person games that rely on stealth and planning, rather than just hammering the fire button repeatedly. This innovative game design also gives our processors a different kind of test, which is very evident in the standard Ubisoft Lighthouse demo. The latest patches also enable SM3.0, which adds on yet another layer of attrition on the graphics card.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is one very demanding game benchmark, and this one takes video card dependence to a completely new level. While not particularly illuminating as a performance metric, it does show that not all games benefit from a faster processor.