$300 Gaming CPU’s: AMD 5000+ Versus Intel E6600

X 3 Reunion

Egosoft: X3 Reunion

The Sequel to the award winning X3: The Threat will introduce a new 3D engine as well as a new story, new ships and a new gameplay to greatly increase the variety in the X-universe. The economy of X3: Reunion will be more complex than anything seen in the X-universe before. Factories are being built by NPCs, wars can affect the global economy, NPCs can trade freely and pirates will behave far more realistically.

Extensive development has gone into the X3 engine, making full use of DirectX 9 technology, to create dramatic visual effects and stunningly realistic starships. Coupled with the massively enhanced A.L. (Artificial Life) system, X3: REUNION will present players with an ever changing, evolving universe; where a player actions really can shape the future of the universe.

The X3 engine is really tough and we started off benchmarking at the default settings on both test systems. With the quality settings both on high and no AA or AF we found that the Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6600 walks all over the AMD A64 5000+ AM2 CPU thanks to a 20 frame per second lead.

We then increased the resolution to 1280×1024 and enabled the eye candy to run the system like many gamers today do. The lead was not as great, but the Intel Core 2 Duo processor again took the win with a 7FPS lead.

With DOOM 3, Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. being GPU limited I was sure that X3: Reunion would be also, but that wasn’t the case. It seems like X3: Reunion and Comanche 4 both love CPU usage and this helps Intel take another win.