Benchmarks: Gaming Performance

While the Phenom processors offer a reasonable performance increase over the Athlon64 X2, they are still quite a fair way off matching Core 2 processors. For example, at 1920x1200 the Core 2 Quad Q6600 was 8% faster than the Phenom 9900 despite the Phenom having a 200MHz clock advantage per core.

Despite the lack-luster UT3 performance, the Phenom processors appear to be quite impressive when testing with Crysis. The Phenom 9500 was able to outperform the Core 2 Duo E8400, while the Phenom 9600 was only 3% slower than the Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 1680x1050.

It was very interesting to find when testing with F.E.A.R using medium quality settings, that the Phenom processors produced such impressive results. Although the Phenom 9900 was just 3% faster than the Core 2 Quad Q6600 at 1920x1200, we found it to be an incredible 25% faster at 1680x1050.

Despite the aggressive F.E.A.R performance, the Phenom processors were unable to defeat the Core 2 processors in Company of Heroes. For the first time we also see a reasonable gain in performance when increasing the clock frequency of the Phenom processors.

The Prey performance results are much like those recorded in Unreal Tournament 3, with the Phenom processors managing to out gun the older Athlon64 X2, but falling short when taking on the Core 2 processors.