Company of Heroes Performance

Company of Heroes is yet another new addition to our CPU benchmark suite, and as a newer game, it offers one of the most demanding benchmark environments ever. CoH is a WW2 real-time strategy game, which again provides us with a nice change of pace from the usual FPS benchmark. We use the game's built-in performance test for all of our benchmarking. To give our AMD and Intel processors a viable test, we've increased the physics load, while dropping many of the graphics settings. This will help provide a more CPU-specific benchmark test, while ensuring that the graphics card is not the limiting factor.

Company of Heroes is one of the most surprising game benchmarks, as it shows a real affinity for the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor. The new 45nm challenger is way out in the lead, and is the only CPU to not only pass 400 fps, but get anywhere near it. The next-closest Core 2 Extreme QX6850 is well back, and although Company of Heroes does show performance improvements on quad core platforms, this discrepancy is likely related to the 45nm architecture and larger 2x6MB of L2 cache.

F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. is one of the newer additions to our game benchmark suite, and it features jaw-dropping graphics and a physics engine that can bring any system to its knees. The game even includes a wide selection of System and Video settings, along with an in-game testing module to keep things 100% comparable. In this case, as we are dealing with CPU performance, we have racked the system and physics settings to maximum, while lowering the graphics quotient to minimum, in an attempt to get rid of any GPU limitations.

F.E.A.R. is a great game for processor testing, as it allows the CPU portion of the test to be ramped up, while dropping the graphics component. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to reward anything more than a dual core configuration, and the performance results fit right in based on clock speed.

Supreme Commander Performance

Supreme Commander is a high-end real-time strategy game, similar to a next-gen Total Annihilation, combining killer graphics with top-level AI. The game is also multi-threaded, but due to processor affinity, it only shares the burden when a core is at 100% usage. This translates into more of an advantage for dual core platforms, but in-game speed and responsiveness can still benefit from quad core processors. In this test, we use the Sim score, which rates performance in the simulation portions of the game.

The Supreme Commander scores are right where we expected them to be, with the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 showing a slight advantage, but with little on the way of quad core benefits.