Quake 4

Moving along now to what everyone really cares about, the game tests. With a name like Gotfrag Hardware, you would assume that our benchmarks are focused mainly around gaming because all we do is play games all day. Well, you’re right. However, the reason we typically run more game benchmarks than other benchmarks is because game benchmarks show genuine honest to goodness real world results, whereas synthetic benchmarks such as a few of the ones already covered in the article, show genuine honest to goodness ideal world results – big difference. Games not only test the graphical limits of your computer, modern games can manhandle your processor with complex physics calculations and the like. So then, on to Quake 4 – one of the most graphically intense games out there, especially on high detail. Our test consisted of the nettimedemo playback of some team deathmatch action on the popular map called sandstorm. That nettimedemo can be downloaded here.



Here you can see the difference that enabling symmetric multiprocessing makes on these processors. In our previous article entitled “Effect of Dual Core Patches”, we outlined the advantages of using dual core patches and the expected increases in performance. Here is no different, with our typical performance increase being somewhere in the neighborhood of 20%.



Same deal, only with the E6700 the performance increase we saw was significantly more, around 30%. These numbers, while typical of dual core vs. single core performance in Quake 4, are very impressive when you consider the frame rates we’re looking at. Over 100 FPS in Quake 4 on medium settings at 1280x1024 resolution is nothing to be ashamed of, that’s for sure.

Another interesting thing we saw with Quake 4 was the emergence of graphics dependence at higher resolutions. Note the scores for the E6700 and X6800 on 1280x1024 resolution with SMP turned on. We previously reported in our article entitled “CPU FPS Limiting: The Pro Gamer’s Plague” that Quake 4 was quite CPU limited. This may indeed be the case at the frame rates in question, but at the performance levels we’re dealing with in this article, the limiting appears to be on the shoulders of the graphics card. Further illustration of this point will be presented in the Overclocking section of this review.