Radeon HD 7970 CPU scaling performance review

DX10: Far Cry 2

Developer Crytek managed to fashion one of the most convincing and striking locales in all of gaming, and satisfied gamers with the freedom to pass through the landscape and tackle enemies in almost any way they saw fit. You surely remember Jack Carver and that things were about to get seriously messed up for you? Well, tough luck. You are no longer at that deserted tropical island, but hop into a jeep and arrive at the sandy savannah surroundings of Africa. And that's a change... as much as you'll no longer run into any mutants, aliens, or any superpowers or psychic powers. Also - you are no longer Jack Carver, you assume the role of one of nine different mercenaries who are embedded in the midst of a brutal civil war which rages in an imaginary African nation.

Everything that goes down is involved in a dirty little bush war in central Africa and you'll have to use a rusty AK-47 and whatever bits of scavenged land mines you can duct-tape together. Two factions struggle for supremacy: the United Front for Liberation and Labour and the Alliance for Popular Resistance, and both are known for blood and control.

Far Cry 2:

• Level Ranch Small
• high-quality DX10 mode
• 8x AA (Anti-aliasing)
• 16x AF (Anisotropic Filtering).

Okay we start of with Far Cry 2, quite a threaded game but due to it's age more filtrate limited rather then GPU limited. So that should get you a good overview what kind of effect different processors have.

If you play your games at 1280x1024 then the 2600K and 3960X totally rape and annihilate any AMD processor. Interestingly enough, the Dual-core Core i6 661 was slowest.

However if you spend 500 EUR on a graphics card, we seriously doubt that you play at that resolution, after we pass a monitor resolution of 1600x1200 we see the numbers get much closer. In fact most of you play games at 1920x1080/1200 and the best symbiotic processor for the graphics card seems to be the Core i7 series.

So while AMD FX 8150 or a Phenom II 070 BE processor will be absolutely sufficient, you get a little more boom-boom-pow with the latest Sandy bridge based processors from Intel.