CPU Benchmarks
In our Crysis 2 Demo performance preview, the game servers were turned off before we were able to test CPU scaling. Let’s see how the full game reacts to different processor frequencies:
Performance scales slightly with every 500 MHz increase on the Phenom II X4, but the Core i5-2500K demonstrates more of a jump than can be explained by a higher clock rate. The game favors Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture, clearly, though even a theoretical 2.0 GHz Phenom II X4 CPU provides enough horsepower to reach a 30 FPS minimum.
With that in mind, the Phenom clearly bottlenecks our GeForce GTX 570, which is something you don't want to see after spending good money on a fast graphics card.
Now let’s see how the game reacts to fewer execution cores:
There’s a dramatic and linear drop from four to two cores. You probably wouldn’t want to be playing Crysis on anything less than a triple-core CPU at 3.5 GHz, and for the best performance a quad-core part is definitely recommended.