Intel P4 3.46EE CPU and 925XE Chipset Review Page 3

By SimHQ on October 31, 2004 in _technology, hide

Falcon 4 performance testing again used the FreeFalcon 3 upgrade mode with SimHQ’s in-house test of a low level, air-to-ground flight that consists of two Falcons using Mk20s and Mavericks. Graphics options, however, were left at their highest settings since the title can hardly be considered as stressful to the test rig’s graphics sub-system.

As with Lock On, Falcon 4 displays an in-game imperceptible advantage while running on the 1066 FSB, with a frame rate that’s almost perfectly linear across the tested resolutions.

Far Cry is undoubtedly the most graphically advanced title in SimHQ’s benchmark suite. As such, all in-game advanced video options were set at medium. Testing consisted of repeated run-throughs of the Research map in God mode since the level includes an excellent combination of the beach, jungle, and interior settings found throughout the game.

As expected Far Cry scales extremely well with graphics processing, and this is born out with the scores generated by the Radeon X800 XT installed. Nevertheless, performance between the two test systems was less than 5% even at 800×600, and with that delta vanishing at higher resolutions as the game’s frame rate becomes limited by the graphics sub-system.

Developed using id Software’s five-year-old Quake 3 engine, Call of Duty (v1.4) is the second title SimHQ uses testing OpenGL rather than the D3D API. Because the game is based on such an aged engine, graphics settings were left unchanged. Scores were derived from the Dawnville demo using the in-game timedemo utility to capture performance. The “com_maxfps” console command was also used to lift the default frame rate cap of 85.