Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Performance Preview

For our last set of benchmark tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with F.E.A.R. and the fulll game version of the wildly popular title, Crysis from Crytek.  For testing processors with Crysis or F.E.A.R, we dropped the screen resolution to 800x600, and reduced all of the in-game image quality options to their minimum values to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible.  However, the in-game effects, which control the level of detail for such things as the game's physics engine and particle system, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Benchmarks with Crysis SP Demo and F.E.A.R. v1.08 DirectX 9 and 10 Gaming Performance

The fastest single processor for gaming from the AMD side of the house, generally speaking  according to these two tests, is the Athlon 64 X2 6400+.  Again, that's according to the game engines at work in Crysis and F.E.A.R.  The fastest processor of Intel's offering is obviously the QX9770, which looks to be 6 - 8% faster than its 3GHz counterpart, the QX9650.  In general though, the AMD systems are easily outperformed by the Intel-based setups, in some cases by a large margin.