Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E Processor Review
NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 2-Way SLI Graphics Performance
Tomb Raider
On March 5th, 2013 Square Enix released Tomb Raider, billed as a reboot of the franchise. In Tomb Raider, the player is confronted with a much younger Lara Croft who is shipwrecked and finds herself stranded on a mysterious island rife with danger, both natural and human. In contrast to the earlier games Croft is portrayed as vulnerable, acting out of necessity, desperation and sheer survival rather than for a greater cause or personal gain.
The game has been built on Crystal Dynamics’s game engine called the “Crystal Engine” and the graphics look fantastic. AMD and Crystal Dyanmic’s worked on a new technology called TressFX Hair, which AMD describes as the worlds first in-game implementation of a real-time, per-strand hair physics system for this game title. We set the image quality to the low quality and ultimate quality presets for benchmarking.
Benchmark Results: At low image quality setting we could see the performance scaling that we expected, but at Ultimate quality (everything cranked up) the performance gap was pretty much gone and the scores were scattered to say the very least. When it comes to gaming performance it is clear that any of these processors are more than up to the task. We went with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan 2-way SLI setup for testing, so there shouldn’t be a GPU bottleneck at these speeds!
Bioshock Infinite:
BioShock Infinite is a first-person shooter video game developed by Irrational Games, and published by 2K Games. BioShock Infinite is the third installment in the BioShock series, and though it is not part of the storyline of previous BioShock games, it does feature similar gameplay concepts and themes. BioShock Infinite uses a Modified Unreal Engine 3 game engine and was released worldwide on March 26, 2013.
We tested BioShock Infinite with the low and ultra game settings at 1920×1080.
Benchmark Results: Again we see some pretty what we expect at low quality settings and then at Ultra quality settings you see most of the processors performing the same.
Hitman: Absolution
Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth DirecX 11 video game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix. It is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series, and runs on IO Interactive’s proprietary Glacier 2 game engine. This game title uses the Glacier 2 game engine and was released on November 20th, 2012.
We benchmarked Hitman: Absolution with the low and ultra game settings at 1920×1080.
Benchmark Results: Hitman: Absolution is tough on discrete graphics cards and even our NVIDIA GeForce GTX Titan SLI setup was only getting up to 80FPS on low quality settings. The results here are scattered once again, but we ran them four times and this is the average of all the numbers. This pretty much just goes to show that a $300 processor will get you the same gaming performance as a $1000 processor on real world game titles.