15 - Game Performance BIA HH| Power Consumption

Gaming: 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 where 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On of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images.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.

I did not want to leave out at least one brand new title. Released little over two weeks ago Band of Brothers: Hell's Highway. I opted this title deliberately as its primary graphics engine is based on the UT3 engine, which we know loves multi-core processors. And here's a situation where that actually shows.

We immediately stumble into a GPU bottleneck at 1600x1200 already. But every little bit of additional performance from 10x7 to 16x12 shows where a CPU can really help, if your GPU would require it. I figured this is a good example to close with. Again, we'll have an article dedicated on Muli-GPU gaming on X58. We'll be totally pimping out that system with scrumptious OCZ DDR3 memory, extravagant cooling, a nice Core i7 965 processor and sweet 3rd party X58 mainboard.

But we can conclude here, if you are on a single GPU with a Core 2 Duo/Quad processor at say 3.0 GHz .. gaming wise you will not gain much performance .. because that CPU never was never the limiting factor in the first place.

Please have a good look at our Multi-GPU game performance article.

Right, quick detour -- power consumption.

Power consumption

Alright then, let's monitor something besides performance... power consumption.

With a TDP of 130W the peak power consumption of the Core i7 is a little high, and that shows when we start to stress the four CPU cores. Overall IDLE consumption however is pretty nice. The i7 will clock down towards 1600 MHz, differing per processor. Preserving a lot of energy. Lower TDP version of core i7 processors are already in the works though.