Results: Arma 3
Athough first-person shooters are typically graphics-bound, Arma 3 at 1920x1080, even with Ultra settings enabled, appears quite platform-dependent when we use a GeForce GTX Titan.
The Athlon X4 750K, overclocked to 4.3 GHz across its four cores, cannot catch a stock dual-core Pentium G3258. And yet, it’d be inaccurate to say this game isn’t optimized for more cores. After all, the stock Core i5-4690K, with its 3.5 GHz base clock rate, is notably quicker than Intel’s 20th anniversary Pentium running 1 GHz faster. Intel’s advantage appears to come from the efficiency of its architecture compared to Piledriver.
You do get a speed-up from tuning AMD’s Athlon. But the gains from tweaking Intel’s Pentium are much more pronounced. In fact, they’re significant enough to take the $75 Pentium almost up to Core i3-4330 levels—and that’s a $140 chip.
Frame time variance is greatest on the stock budget-oriented processors, while the Core i3 and i5 prove to be very well-behaved. Then again, we wouldn’t worry about any of these results.
