Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

Last but definitely not least in Intel's benchmark suite is VALVe's venerable old HDR test Half-Life 2: Lost coast. This is the only real-world gaming benchmark that Intel conducted, or at least chose to publish, on the Penryn processors. While all previous tests do a good job at providing us with some idea of the synthetic application performance these processors can provide, gaming performance is the number we are most concerned with.


Here we see some fairly impressive yet somewhat suspicious results. There is a 57 FPS difference between the quad-core Penryn and the QX6700, which seems fair considering the extra 667MHz and the SSE4 capability (aids significantly in multimedia and gaming). However, when we ran our tests with the QX6700 back in November of last year, we found that there would always be an advantage for the quad-core processor over the similarly clocked dual-core one. We considered this to be the result of being able to offload background calculations to the other cores while the cores in use by the game chugged along just the same. With this in mind, the identical numbers between the quad-core and dual-core chips seems kind of fishy - but we did not run the tests so we cannot speculate as to the conditions under which they were run.

Conclusion
All of these tests seem to point to the fact that Intel is not lying about the success they have been having with Penryn. Although much of the evident performance increases can be explained through the 667MHz clock speed bump, some of the differences are greater than an increased speed can accommodate. The new features of on the Penryn core, namely SSE4, the Radix-16 Divider, 1333MHz FSB, and a larger L2 cache clearly boost performance of the new chip substantially.

Although we like to see genuine performance numbers coming out of Intel and IDF, we have to hold our applause on announcements like these because in the end, the numbers are indeed coming straight from Intel. While the engineers at the world’s largest chip maker are having a good time testing out their new design, reviewers are patiently waiting for their own turn with Penryn. No matter how legitimate Intel’s numbers may be, it is not until hardware review publications get a hold of the chip that the true performance benefits of Penryn will be understood.