Results: Arma 3, Battlefield 4, Grid 2 and Metro: Last Light
Arma 3
The average frame rates in Arma 3 look fairly similar to what we saw in our first look at the Pentium G3258 pitted against AMD’s Athlon X4 750K. The Athlon picks up a little speed, as does Intel’s CPU. Bottom line: at 4.4 GHz, the Pentium does less to bottleneck a GeForce GTX Titan than the Athlon at 4.3 GHz. As you scale back graphics horsepower, the difference between both CPUs will invariably shrink. But if you’re talking potential, well, there it is.
Each configuration appears to encounter occasional frame time variance spikes, though only the stock Athlon’s appear frequently.
Battlefield 4
Battlefield 4 at its Ultra detail setting is taxing enough that these CPUs all appear to be fairly similar. This test does come from the single-player campaign though, which is decidedly graphics-bound.
We’ve certainly heard your calls for more testing from the multi-player component of Battlefield 4 and have even talked to DICE directly about developing something more representative of that aspect. However, they concede the difficulty of generating accurate benchmark numbers, given the ever-changing multi-player world.
At the very least, it’s good to see plenty-playable frame rates, even with a dual-core processor. Frame time variance is incredibly low on average, though we rarely encounter a Haswell-based chip landing in last place. Despite its less efficient architecture, AMD’s four integer units appear better able to facilitate a smooth performance than Intel’s two execution cores.
Grid 2
Grid 2 is notorious for its dependency on CPU and memory performance. But as we’ve seen in the past, four integer units aren’t enough to stave off two Haswell cores. A small win at stock clock rates grows in the face of overclocking, showing Intel’s Pentium G3258 to be faster than an Athlon X4 750K.
Even though the Athlon has little trouble matching (and even beating) the Pentium’s peak performance, Intel more consistently maintains higher average frame rates. Where it falls behind again is in our frame time variance measurement; the G3258 encounters higher spikes more often, though they’re not any more problematic in Grid than they were in Battlefield.
Metro: Last Light
The Athlon and Pentium both enjoy significant speed-ups due to overclocking, nearly matching Intel’s Core i3-4330. Unfortunately, they still register minimum frame rates under 30 FPS when the going gets tough.
