Benchmarks: Crysis 3, BioShock, Metro Redux, Tomb Raider
The Radeon R9 285 can only render a maximum of 40fps in Crysis 3 at 1080p using the quality settings we tested with. As you can see the Pentium G3258 was able to achieve this target without any overclocking while the Athlon X4 860K could only render 34.3fps out of the box and overclocking pushed it to 39.2fps.
Overclocked, the Pentium G3258 is 3% faster than the Athlon X4 860K but given that equates to just 1fps, it's fair to say that in their overclocked state both CPUs deliver similar performance in Crysis 3 with the R9 285.
Interestingly, when testing with the GTX 960 the G3258 required overclocking to achieve 40fps, while the overclocked X4 860K was only able to match the standard G3258. The G3258 was 7% faster when comparing the overclocked configurations.
When testing with BioShock Infinite with the R9 285, the Pentium was 11% faster than the Athlon when comparing the overclocked results.
Using the GTX 960 reduces the margin slightly as Intel's chip is now 9% faster than AMD's. It's worth pointing out that with over 60fps, both easily delivered playable performance in BioShock.
Metro Redux is the first game that shows a significant performance gain favoring Intel's dual-core processor. With both the Pentium G3258 and Athlon X4 860K clocked at 4.4GHz, the G3258 was 16% faster.
Although this meant that the G3258 was just 4.5fps faster than the X4 860K, that counted significantly toward delivering playable performance as the overclocked Pentium was the only solution to exceed 30fps.
The Pentium's huge 16% performance advantage in Metro Redux when testing with the R9 285 disappeared when we swapped it for the GTX 960. Here the G3258 is just 4% faster than the X4 860K once both are overclocked to 4.4GHz.
The G3258 is almost able to get the most out of the R9 285 at its default 3.2GHz operating frequency, as it gained just 2fps extra through overclocking. The Athlon X4 860K only managed 61.4fps out of the box, while overclocking it to 4.4GHz boosted the frame rate to 66.2fps. The G3258 was 2% faster when comparing the overclocked results, though with just 1.5fps separating the two it's close enough to call it a tie.
Again the Pentium was 2% faster than the Athlon, this time when testing Tomb Raider using the GTX 960. That said, just 1fps separated the two CPUs, so again this is close enough to call a tie.