Intel P35: Game Performance Update

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is one of the better RTS games to be released in recent memory although we are still huge fans of Command and Conquer 3 along with Company of Heroes. We chose Supreme Commander as it is both a GPU and CPU hog when it comes to systems resources. We utilize the built-in performance test to benchmark the game. We set all of the settings to high and only change the resolutions or AA settings between benchmark runs. This benchmark provides a cornucopia of results but for our tests we will report the average frame rates during the benchmark. We generally find this game to be playable across the network with frame rates at or above 30fps.



Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes was released last year and is still proving to be a very addictive RTS game around the office. The game is extremely GPU intensive and also requires a hefty CPU at times. The game contains a built-in performance test that utilizes the game engine to generate several different action scenes. We found the performance test gives a good indication of how well your system will perform throughout the game on average. We have found some of the in-game action sequences to be more demanding than the performance test and are working on game play benchmark that is repeatable. We generally found the game to be enjoyable with an average frame rate above 35fps.



Prey

Prey offers some superb action sequences, unique weapons and characters, and is a visually stunning game at times. It still requires a very good GPU to run it with all of the eye candy turned on. We set all graphic settings to their maximum except for AA/AF and utilize a custom timedemo that takes place during one of the more action oriented sequences. We generally found the game to be enjoyable with an average frame rate above 35fps.



S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is one of the favorite first person shooter games around the office as it continues to provide a great deal of replay value and the graphics are very good once the eye candy is turned on. What we especially like about the game is the atmosphere and the fact that it makes for a great system benchmark.


Gaming Summary

We were not expecting significant improvements in Supreme Commander as the game will take any system you throw at it and send it flying back to you at maximum settings. The one positive is improved memory timings at DDR3-1333 resulted in an almost 3% performance improvement. In Company of Heroes and Prey we see the familiar 1% improvement when lowering the memory timings. The most significant improvement in our game testing is in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with the DDR3-1066 setup showing an 11% improvement when lowering the memory timings indicating this game is very sensitive to both bandwidth and latencies. We tripled checked out setup and scores, each time we had the same results.