AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Processor Performance Review

Colin McRae: DiRT2

Colin McRae: DiRT 2 is one of the most anticipated racing games of the year and will take full advantage of DirectX 11, adding realism to the racing environment. The game also will have hardware tessellation that is said to improve the appearance of water and other surfaces, as well as crowd animations. Utilizing the EGO Engine, DiRT 2 should raise the bar for PC gaming and is a definite must-have for PC gamers as it will have cars and tracks twice as detailed as those seen in Race Driver: GRID. To test I use the high presets with no AA.

Benchmark Results: The AMD Phenom II X6 1055T was able to edge out the Intel Core I7 930 by a few frames per second at both resolutions that we tested at.

Curious about how the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T was able to out perform the Intel Core I7 930 in Colin McRae: DiRT 2. We decided to fire the game up in windowed mode and watch the CPU usage. The results were intriguing. Despite the hyper threading on the Intel Core I7 930 this particular game would only take advantage of four threads, while the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T had activity across all six of the cores. This is the reason that it performed the best in this game test as the game title is clearly optimized to run on six physical cores.