Benchmark Results: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
With synthetic benchmarks out of the way, we can now consider the effect these processors have on actual games. We begin with the latest Call of Duty installment at its highest detail levels, but without the added image enhancement of anti-aliasing (AA).
The overclocked Core i3-530 looks good, but it appears that, clock-for-clock, AMD would have taken the lead. It also appears that four cores are better than three in this particular benchmark, but this metric nearly becomes GPU-bound at our highest test resolution.
Enabling 4x AA puts even more stress on the GPU, to the point that we no longer see a noticeable performance difference between five of the configurations. The sixth configuration, Intel’s ultra-expensive Core i7-870, ironically falls slightly behind.
