Benchmark Results: Batman: Arkham City
Given the decidedly graphics-bound nature of Crysis 2, I decided to give Batman: Arkham City a shot. As it turns out, the title actually is somewhat sensitive to processor performance at 1680x1050 and 1920x1080, so long as anti-aliasing is disabled.
At those resolutions, higher clock rates seem more important than the difference between four or six cores. It just so happens that the first-place Core i7-3960X enjoys the benefit of a 3.9 GHz top Turbo Boost bin, plus a large 15 MB shared L3 cache.
You’ll notice that both AMD chips lag behind at our two most differentiated resolutions. Turn on anti-aliasing or bump up to 2560x1600, though, and the delta narrows substantially. Bottom line: FX and Phenom II both emerge as bottlenecks long before Intel’s Core processors. But it takes a $500 graphics card to uncover the difference most dramatically.
