AMD Phenom II X4 810 and X3 720BE review (AM3) - Game performance - BIA: Hell's Highway

Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway

Hells Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers which is led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war. The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles were fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

On of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities from our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood. This editor is Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lot's of geometry is to be found here and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

Brothers in Arms Hell's Highway is an interesting title as it is using the Unreal 3 graphics engine. That engine is very multi-core optimized, but that by itself doesn't move mountains, as the faster clocked (2800 MHz) X3 720BE still outperforms the X4 810 (2600 MHz) and smaller L3 cache.

But have a look at the Athlon X2 7750 BE. That's a 2700Mhz dual core processor. And as you can see, the game just diggs 3 or more CPU cores to flex it's gaming performance muscle.

What's interesting to see is that in the lower resolutions Core i7 920 has a small performance advantage. And in the higher resolutions the Phenom II. We'll see this more today. The AMD 790 chipset shows a lot of potential here.

Now, if my thesis is accurate, (faster clocked processors equal more performance than additional 3+ CPU cores) then overclocking should reveal performance increases, well .. look and observe.

BIA loves 3 CPU cores, and preferable they are fasted clocked in frequency.