Performance - FEAR | COD4 | Crysis

Gaming: F.E.A.R.

As many of you will be aware, F.E.A.R. (or First Encounter Assault & Recon in short) involves a rather mysterious looking girl in a red dress, a man with an unappetizing taste for human flesh and some rather flashy action set pieces aka The Matrix. All of this is brought together by one of the best game engines around.

F.E.A.R. makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic powers capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesnt end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflexes that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with slow motion effects like that of Max Payne, or the before mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with boxes sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

Let me confirm to you that based on this, F.E.A.R. will have you shaking on the edge of your seat, if not falling off it. The tension is brought to just the right level with key moments that will make your heart leap. Play the demo and you will see what I mean. The key to this, is the girl. Without revealing anything significant, lets just say that she could take on the whole of Mars for creepiness.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• Soft Shadows Disabled

FEAR is getting outdated and therefore slowly becoming CPU dependant (the GPUs are more than fast enough for the game). It's a little unfortunate, but we have to acknowledge that Intel has the faster solution here. The performance is easily tweaked out though when you look at the overclocked results. But that's a game that Intel processors can play just as well, or even better of course.

Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die... and then continue the game in the past.

For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, and load up ACT II - All Ghillied Up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide yourself as best as you can.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

COD 4 then, as you can see here the tide turns around. We notice time after time that COD4 does really well on the 790FX/GX platform in combo with a Phenom stepping B3 / Athlon X2 stepping B3 based processor. That's really nice.

Crysis

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering

In Crysis however the tides turns against AMD again. So as you can see, Intel wins a couple, AMD wins a couple. This is pretty consistent behavior we see throughout all the benchmark sessions we just showed you.

Therefore the only thing we can conclude is that Intel's E8200 processor and AMD's Athlon X2 7750BE processor are very competitive to each other, yet the E8200 has the upper hand, yet also costs a third more in price.