Far Cry
The next tests are games tests starting with Far Cry. There are no major changes except for a slight modification in the test scene that is now a trip in the outside map training, using an ATI graphic card. We noticed that with some chipsets and some of the NVIDIA driver versions, with this rather heavy scene for the processor, the performances were sometime quite strange.
Games aren’t multithreaded and won’t be, for most of them, before a long time as it is relatively difficult to do. According to EPIC, working on the Unreal Engine 3, which will be multithreaded, such a code requires two to three time more development time. The first game based on engines really using the dual core processor capacities will be out at the end of 2006.
Dual core doesn’t improve performances with Far Cry and AMD processors are, like with most of the games’ applications, way ahead of Intel’s solutions. The Pentium D 820 is the last one. There is a slight performance increase between the AMD 4800+ and 4000+ which isn’t really due to the improvement from one to two cores but most likely to the cache revision of these cores between the two CPUs.
Pacific Fighters
No important changes for Pacific Fighters except for the upgrade to 3.04 version and the use of the ATI graphic card.
As with Far Cry, we didn’t notice any real performance increases due to the increase of the number of cores available. Dual core performances were then left slightly behind because of the lower frequency. Even if most games like Far Cry are a lot faster with an Athlon 64 than with a Pentium 4, it is clear here that it provides honorable results.
