Lynnfield PCI-Express Gaming Performance

September 14, 2009 | 09:58

Tags: #5 #2 #cod #compare #comparison #core #crossfire #crysis #i5 #i7 #left4dead #lynnfield #pci-express #performance #quad #sli

Companies: #game #intel #test

Crysis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Crysis is seen by many as the poster boy for DirectX 10 and it will make your system cry, quite literally – it’s a monster! It doesn’t come as much of a surprise then, that the graphics are something special – they’re above and beyond anything we’ve ever seen in a PC game.

We tested the game using the 64-bit executable under DirectX 10 with the 1.21 patch applied. We used a custom timedemo recorded from the Laws of Nature level which is more representative of gameplay than the built-in benchmark that renders things much faster than you're going to experience in game. We found that around 27-33 fps in our custom timedemo was sufficient enough to obtain a playable frame rate through the game. It's a little different to other games in that the low frame rates still appear to be quite smooth.

We set all of the in-game details to High at 1,680 x 1,050 using 0xAA and 0xAF.

Crysis

GeForce GTX 280. 1680x1050, High, 0xAA, 0xAF

  • Intel Lynnfield and P55
  • Intel Core i7 and X58
  • Intel Core 2 Quad and P45
    • 40.1
    • 24.2
    • 39.8
    • 25.0
    • 36.8
    • 20.5
0
10
20
30
40
Frames Per Second - higher is better
  • Average FPS
  • Minimum FPS

Crysis

GeForce GTX 280 SLI. 1680x1050, High, 0xAA, 0xAF

  • Intel Lynnfield and P55
  • Intel Core i7 and X58
    • 51.0
    • 30.3
    • 55.3
    • 31.4
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Frames Per Second - higher is better
  • Average FPS
  • Minimum FPS

Crysis

Sapphire HD 4870 1GB Toxic CrossFire. 1680x1050, High, 0xAA, 0xAF

  • Intel Lynnfield and P55
  • Intel Core i7 and X58
  • Intel Core 2 Quad and P45
    • 41.1
    • 24.9
    • 47.1
    • 30.6
    • 41.4
    • 23.5
0
10
20
30
40
50
Frames Per Second - higher is better
  • Average FPS
  • Minimum FPS

The consistent results are that the Core i7 board yields a higher minimum frame rate, and in both multi-GPU environments the two x16 lanes make a few frames per second difference in its favour too again the older Core 2 Quad and latest Lynnfield systems. With a single PCI-Express card there's very little difference between Lynnfield and Core i7 though - the on-die PCI-Express balances out against the extra channel of memory bandwidth.

Lynnfield stretches a constant lead over an equivalent Core 2 Quad with a single GPU though, it clearly delivers faster average and minimum frame rates.
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