CPU Reviews & Articles

Company of Heroes Performance

Company of Heroes is one of the newer additions 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, as it shows a real affinity for the new 45nm Core 2 processors. The greater physics load means it also scales extremely well to higher clock speeds, giving us one of the few gaming charts that clearly delineates CPU performance. The Yorkfield and Wolfdale cores do extremely well in this test, and the 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo E8500 shows exceptional performance gains, almost hitting 500.

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. Core speed seems to be king here, and while the 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo E8500 does post the highest score, it is not significantly faster than the 3.0 GHz quad cores.

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.

The Supreme Commander scores fall in line with previous game benchmarks, and have the Core 2 Duo E8500 right at the top, just ahead of the 3.0 GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9650.