AMD Phenom II X4 810 Review

Page 10 - Performance: Gaming (Far Cry 2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, World in Conflict)

In the second round of game testing we threw in the long awaited Far Cry 2, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from ID Software, interesting for being an OpenGL release and World in Conflict from Massive Entertainment, that is one of the most graphically intense (resources that is) real time strategy game.

Far Cry 2

The Far Cry was made by Crytek and was later succeeded by Crysis. But Crytek sold all rights of Far Cry to Ubisoft, so the engine of Far Cry 2 had nothing to do with Crysis and was developed separately.

Despite the high levels of detail, filtration and so on, that make the graphics of the game look more than awesome, it still runs comfortably with more than 50 frames per second. But concentrating on the processors, we do get to feel the usefulness not only of the more megahertz but of the new AMD Phenom II architecture too. The processor dominates over the older Phenom, and 810 is positioned with 15% behind 940 - which is about the difference in their frequency too.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

The game is based on the newest version of Doom 3 OpenGL engine.

Again, with Enemy Territory Quake Wars more cores are better and the processor frequency is not a leading factor.

World in Conflict

The game is very appropriate for our tests, using DirectX 10 effects, soft particles, HDR smoke, awesome explosions and lighting effects. Because of the uncomfortable ways to test the recorded timedemo in World in Conflict, we used the integrated benchmark that is well known for its CPU dependence. Let's see if that's true:

Alas, with World in Conflict things boil down to mere frequency, rather than number of threads.