AMD Phenom 9900 Performance Preview - Page 10

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 one of the most surprising game benchmarks, but from an AMD perspective, for all the wrong reasons. Intel has owned this particular benchmark since the Core 2 was released, and the quad core Phenom does absolutely nothing to change that. Core speed again seems to reign supreme, and Company of Heroes just seems to love the Core 2 architecture. From an AMD point of view, The 2.6 GHz Phenom 9900 does outdistance the 3.0 GHz Athlon 64 X2 6000+, but stays over 100 fps back of the 3.0 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6850.

F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. is one of the newer additions to our game benchmark suite, and it features jaw-dropping graphics and a physics engine that can bring any system to its knees. The game even includes a wide selection of System and Video settings, along with an in-game testing module to keep things 100% comparable. In this case, as we are dealing with CPU performance, we have racked the system and physics settings to maximum, while lowering the graphics quotient to minimum, in an attempt to get rid of any GPU limitations.

F.E.A.R. is a great game for processor testing, as it allows the CPU portion of the test to be ramped up, while dropping the graphics component. Unfortunately, it does not change the status quo, and again the Phenom 9900 seems out of its depth compared to the Intel competition. It's almost a mirror image of the CoH benchmarking, as the 2.6 GHz Phenom 9900 manages to outperform the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, while remaining a few ZIP codes away from the Core 2 Extreme QX6850.

Supreme Commander Performance

Supreme Commander is a high-end real-time strategy game, similar to a next-gen Total Annihilation, combining killer graphics with top-level AI. The game is also multi-threaded, but due to processor affinity, it only shares the burden when a core is at 100% usage. This translates into more of an advantage for dual core platforms, but in-game speed and responsiveness can still benefit from quad core processors. In this test, we use the Sim score, which rates performance in the simulation portions of the game.

Due to the 4-digit results, the Supreme Commander Sim scores are a bit more difficult to read, but amazingly, the Phenom 9900 posts the highest score.