Crysis Warhead
We measured Warhead performance using the FRAPS frame-rate recording tool and playing over the same 60-second section of the game five times on each processor. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frame rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.
We tested at at relatively modest graphics settings, 1024x768 resolution with the game's "Mainstream" quality settings, because we didn't want our graphics card to be the performance-limiting factor. This is, after all, a CPU test.


The results of our first game test suggest AMD wasn't far off on its product positioning: the Phenom II X4 955 just trails the Core 2 Quad Q9550 in average frame rate, but both chips produce a minimum frame rate of 28 FPS, which suggests they'll deliver very similar experiences.
Incidentally, this is probably the most CPU-intensive game we'll test, but like many of today's games, it's probably primarily limited by GPU performance. If you look at the Warhead performance results from our latest video card review, in which we tested the same area of the game in the same basic fashion, even a pretty nice video card like a Radeon HD 4870 1GB would limit the frame rates achieved by a relatively lowly CPU like ye olde Core 2 Quad Q6600. Of course, we are in that case testing at a relatively high resolution with nice image quality settings, and your mileage may vary depending on your display resolution and in-game settings.
Then again, like most games, Warhead really only makes use of one or two processor cores, as evidenced by the strong showings of the Core 2 Duo E8400 and E8600 chips here. So you can spend less and get more by going for a high-frequency dual-core processor, if gaming performance is your main goal.
Far Cry 2
After playing around with Far Cry 2, I decided to test it a little bit differently by recording frame rates during the jeep ride sequence at the very beginning of the game. I found that frame rates during this sequence were generally similar to those when running around elsewhere in the game, and after all, playing Far Cry 2 involves quite a bit of driving around. Since this sequence was repeatable, I just captured results from three 90-second sessions.
Again, I didn't want the graphics card to be our primary performance constraint, so although I tested at fairly high visual quality levels, I used a relatively low 1024x768 display resolution and DirectX 9.


Impressively, the X4 955 outperforms the Core i7-940 in terms of average frame rate, although the i7-940 has a higher minimum, which arguably counts for more. Once again, the Q9550 and X4 955 are very closely matched, with the edge going to the Q9550 by a hair.
| Alienware's Graphics Amplifier brings desktop GPUs to notebooks | 16 |