TechArp X264 HD benchmark

This benchmark has been introduced to me by Piotke, who used it in his QX9650 review. Using multiple cores it gives us quite a decent view on how fast our setup can encode a short DVD-MPEG2 video clip into an X264 clip. We used the latest HD resolution version of the benchmark to run our tests.



The triple core clearly performs better than the dual core.

Crysis

Crysis is one of the newer games on the market, one of those games you want to play at highest settings but just can't. Due to the insane amount of details, rendering the game becomes very hard, even for the very recent high-end video cards. We used the Crysis benchmark tool (can be found on Guru3D) and tested both systems in two different test environments: 800x600 and 1680x1050, for the same reasons as Prey. We used the CPU benchmark demo of Crysis.



Surprisingly, the X3 doesn't do that well in the game tests! I reckon Crysis is not yet fully optimized for triple core processing units.

Prey

Prey uses the venerable game engine from ID software, Tech4 it’s called now, also used for Doom 3 and Quake 4. Prey started development back in 1995, and it took 11 years to see this project come to completion, but when it finally was launched, gamers were pleased with such beautiful graphics, nice story line and original gravity puzzles.



With the help of the HardwareOC Prey benchmark utility, we tested the performance. As we know we're a bit limited when it comes to graphical power, we ran the Prey game in two different test scenarios:

- 640x480, Low detail, no AA or AF: To magnify the difference between both processors
- 1680x1050, low detail, no AA or AF: Is the difference still visible in higher resolutions?



In Prey, the X3 is slower than the dual core of Intel, which can be partially explained by Prey being a single-threaded game and has thus no advantage with one core extra. However, that doesn't explain why the X3 comes behind in both game tests, whereas the X4 is pretty much on par with the Intel Q9300.