Results: Thief
Processor performance matters at the highest detail settings of Thief, too. In this case, however, even the stock Pentium outperforms AMD’s overclocked Athlon X4 750K. As far as averages go, tweaking the Pentium pushes performance above Intel’s Core i3-4330, though that Hyper-Threading-enabled CPU achieves a slightly higher minimum frame rate.
Tracking performance over time, it’s easy to gauge the impact of overclocking on Intel’s unlocked Pentium and AMD’s Athlon X4.
Intel’s Pentium G3258 registers the highest frame time variance in Thief, and you can see a handful of big spikes in the variance over time chart below.
This outcome is particularly interesting since the frame rate figures in the two previous charts suggested such good behavior from the Pentium. What we see here instead suggests the dual-core, non-Hyper-Threaded processor suffers incurs more quantifiable stuttering, even paired to a very fast GeForce GTX Titan, compared to the other contenders able to handle four threads.