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- Date:
- Friday , July 14, 2006
- Author:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Intel Core 2 Gaming Performance
We test Intel's Core 2 Duo and Extreme using real-world gaming. Don't let a bunch of canned benchmarks lie to you about gaming performance, real gameplay experience tells a different story. Unless of course you game at 800x600.
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
(DirectX 9)
Oblivion is the next Elder Scrolls game and the unconnected sequel to Morrowind. It uses the multi-platform Gamebyro game engine. Oblivion features DirectX 9 shaders and Havok physics. The engine supports lush vegetation, soft shadows, and high dynamic range lighting (HDR). Oblivion also features SpeedTree for rendering trees.
For testing, we have chosen to do a manual run-through riding horseback from outside the Imperial City to Chorrol, and then to Bruma. This run-through allows us to push the hardware as much as the game can. While this is an outdoor run-through, we do make sure to test indoor situations in our gameplay analysis as well. We have found that turning on the torch indoors with HDR lighting causes a big hit to performance in some situations. We make sure to test this scenario. You really have to look at the game as two different scenarios, Outdoors and Indoors.
Oblivion is the only game in our testing suite that we found had any kind of gaming experience differentiation between the Intel’s Core 2 and AMD's FX-62. Even then, it was only a small difference. First of all, we decided that 1280x1024 was the best resolution to use here. If we went to 1600x1200, we found that we would have had to lower a lot of in-game settings to achieve playable performance. The benefit of a higher resolution would be nullified by lowering so many in-game graphics options. It would have also made the testing much more GPU limited. By lowering to 1280x1024, this allowed us to maximize almost all in-game graphics settings in Oblivion creating a very immersive gaming experience.
There were still a few options we had to turn down or off, though, on both platforms, mainly due to graphics performance limitations. We had to turn grass down to medium and turn off self shadows, and shadows on grass. Each setting incurred a high performance hit when enabled, especially grass and shadows on grass. Everything else between all three CPUs was the same, HDR enabled, highest tree, actor, item and object fade.
The ONLY difference that we experienced is that we did have to lower a couple of settings with the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 platform compared to the Intel platforms. This was the internal and external shadows. Luckily, the shadow sliders there are “notched” so it is easy to know exactly what position they are in. With the Intel CPUs, we were able to have this 5 notches up, which is in the middle of the slider for those shadow options. When we tried these same settings on the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 platform, we found performance to be overall lower than the Intel CPUs and not playable. By moving those sliders down a couple of notches to 3 notches on the slider, performance was now playable.
The difference in graphics quality is minor though between notch 3 and 5. We noticed that some objects cast shadows farther in the distance as we approached them with the slider at notch 5. We also noticed that at extreme angles when viewing in third person view zoomed all the way out the character was casting a shadow in more places than with notch 3. That’s all we noticed between the slider positions.
Otherwise, all three CPUs played well at 1280x1024 with no AA/16X AF and HDR enabled. The graph shows that with the settings tested the CPUs are dead even. The average framerate confirms it with each hovering at a 39 FPS average framerate.