AMD FX Vs. Intel Core i3: Exploring Game Performance With Cheap GPUs

Benchmark Results: Metro 2033

Performance Target: 30 FPS Minimum

We know Metro to be a graphics-limited title capable of dropping very high-end boards to their knees. In our last story, however, we used the Very High quality preset and barely achieved a 16 FPS minimum frame rate. Now that our target is 30 FPS, we have to drop our settings and see what happens.

The results are fairly close across the board, although the Core i3-2100 demonstrates a lead in some parts of the benchmark when the Radeon HD 5570 is used. This is interesting because low-end GPUs most often limit graphics performance. But the results make more sense when you remember that a low-end card must necessarily be used in conjunction with lower resolutions and detail settings. The Radeon HD 5570 was the only card that couldn’t handle 1080p, so it was tested at 1366x768.

This is the first time we've seen a sizable gap between processors, so we're curious to see what will happen when we smooth out performance by targeting higher frame rates.

Performance Target: 40 FPS Minimum, 60 FPS Average

Faced with higher frame rate targets, we see noteworthy differences in performance. Finally, we see evidence of processor choice affecting performance in a definitive way.

We had to drop our Radeon HD 5570-based setup to 1024x768 to hit these numbers. And while the Core i3-2100 capitalizes on the lesser workload, the FX-4100 is unable to push frame rates much higher than it did in our prior analysis. The story is similar across all graphics cards.

The differences are too large to ignore. Interestingly, the FX-4100’s minimum frame rate never exceeds 34 FPS, suggesting a particular bottleneck that didn't affect the Core i3, which manages to hit a 45 FPS minimum.