Gory Gaming: Bulletstorm Performance Analyzed

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Although the game had significant performance issues when it was released, Bulletstorm now benefits from the latest graphics drivers and a patch from its developers. Now is the perfect time to see what kind of hardware this game requires for smooth play.

Benchmark Results: CPU Performance

Now that we've seen how some of the most popular graphics cards handle Bulletstorm, let’s check out CPU performance with graphics normalized. First, we’ll test quad-core processors at various clock speeds:

There’s definitely a correlation between clock rate and minimum frame rate, but even a 2.0 GHz quad-core Phenom facilitates a minimum 40 FPS.

But how does the newest version of the Unreal 3 engine run with fewer CPU cores at its disposal?

This is a dramatic result and shows that Epic is serious about multithreading. At 2.5 GHz, the dual-core CPU demonstrates a tremendous drop in performance compared to the triple- and quad-core results. The single-core CPU result is absolutely dismal.

With all of this information at our disposal, we think it’s reasonable to conclude that Bulletstorm is best run on at least a 2.0 GHz quad-core processor or a 2.5 GHz triple-core model.

Don Woligroski
40 Comments Comment from the forums
  • JohnnyLucky
    The next time how about installing a game on a solid state drive and a hard disk drive so we can find out about any differences in game play.
    Reply
  • shubham1401
    mayankleoboy1i enjoy the game and i am not embarrassed to admit it on my 3.33ghz core 2 duo and gtx580, it stutters a lot during some areas and level loading. even a slight CPU use by another processes make this game unplayable.
    Didn't happen with me. I have a 2.66Ghz C2D and 9800GT. And I played the whole game with ~45Fps at 1600X900 medium settings.
    :)
    Reply
  • yyrkoon
    JohnnyLuckyThe next time how about installing a game on a solid state drive and a hard disk drive so we can find out about any differences in game play.
    Where have you been for the last decade? It would only effect level loading.
    Reply
  • haplo602
    why are the pictures and descriptions on the cards backwards ? I mean firs the image than the description ? since we are scrolling DOWN normaly, it's the wrong way around.
    Reply
  • Maziar
    Thanks for the review :)
    The good thing about Unreal engine is that the PC game powered by it are almost always optimized and that's what's lacking in most of todays' PC games.
    Reply
  • kevith
    Why this commercial disguised as an article?
    Reply
  • hannibal
    The thing that "Epic is serious about multithreading" is good thing to see! We have had so long time 4 to 6 core CPUs, that it has been a shame that those cores had not been supported in games so far. This is very promising indeed!
    Reply
  • nevertell
    You definitely have to do these more often.
    Reply
  • Formata
    I love this sort of article. Would be nice to see that same sort of comparison done with Witcher 2
    Reply
  • joshyboy82
    I had no interest in buying this game, but I read the review to see if it my change my mind. Sadly it won't. I already am into too many games and I just can't seem to beat CS:S, so when I've run out of Witcher sequels and Portals, I'll only have Battlefields and Diablos to conquer, before I become a full time farmer (as a in-game career) in Skyrim. Sorry about your luck.
    Reply