Intel Pentium G850 Sandy Bridge 2.9GHz CPU Review

Discrete Graphics Card Performance

We had a number of people e-mail in after our Intel Pentium G620 processor review and ask to look at discrete video card performance on these budget minded processors. We know slapping a super high-end video card like an AMD Radeon HD 6990 onto a sub $100 processor is silly, but that is what we did. We did this as this is dual-GPU is one of the most CPU hungry video card solutions on the market today! We installed the card into the test system and ran AMD Catalyst 11.8 Beta drivers for testing.

3DMark Vantage:

3DMark Vantage is the new industry standard PC gaming performance
benchmark from Futuremark, newly designed for Windows Vista and
DirectX10. It includes two new graphics tests, two new CPU tests,
several new feature tests, and support for the latest hardware. 3DMark
Vantage is based on a completely new rendering engine, developed
specifically to take full advantage of DirectX10, the new graphics API
from Microsoft.

The Performance settings were used for testing, so a resolution of 1280×1024 was used.

Benchmark Results: As you can see the performance of the AMD Radeon HD 6990 improved as the CPU’s became faster.

HAWX 2:

Aerial warfare has evolved. So have you. As a member of the ultra-secret H.A.W.X. 2 squadron, you are one of the chosen few, one of the truly elite. You will use finely honed reflexes, bleeding-edge technology and ultra-sophisticated aircraft – their existence denied by many governments – to dominate the skies. You will do so by mastering every nuance of the world’s finest combat aircraft. You will slip into enemy territory undetected, deliver a crippling blow and escape before he can summon a response. You will use your superior technology to decimate the enemy from afar, then draw him in close for a pulse-pounding dogfight. And you will use your steel nerve to successfully execute night raids, aerial refueling and more. You will do all this with professionalism, skill and consummate lethality. Because you are a member of H.A.W.X. 2 and you are one of the finest military aviators the world has ever known. H.A.W.X. 2 was released on November 16, 2010 for PC gamers.

We ran the benchmark in DX10 mode with the image quality settings set to low as you can see above.

The H.A.W.X. 2 PC game title runs on what looks like five threads if the processor being tested has that many available.

Benchmark Results: H.A.W.X. 2 showed a nice performance bump on the Radeon HD 6990 when moving up to the Intel Pentium G850. It looks like that extra 300Mhz clock speed really does make a difference in the games.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat:

The events of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat unfold shortly after the end of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl following the ending in which Strelok destroys the C-Consciousness. Having discovered the open path to the Zone’s center, the government decides to stage a large-scale operation to take control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat utilizes the XRAY 1.6 Engine, allowing advanced modern graphical features through the use of DirectX 11 to be fully integrated; one outstanding feature being the inclusion of real-time GPU tessellation. Regions and maps feature photo realistic scenes of the region it is made to represent. There is also extensive support for older versions of DirectX, meaning that Call of Pripyat is also compatible with older DirectX 8, 9, 10 and 10.1 graphics cards.

The game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, but they do have a standalone benchmark available that we used for our testing purposes. The screen capture above shows the main window of the benchmark with our settings. Notice we are running Enhanced Full Dynamic Lighting “DX10” as our renderer. Under the advanced settings we disabled tessellation, MSAA and ambient occlusion.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat looks to only be threaded for one CPU core as you can see from the Windows Task Manager screen capture that was done during a benchmark run.

Benchmark Results: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat is a single threaded game, but performance scaled nicely once again with clock frequency!

Resident Evil 5:

Resident Evil 5 is a survival horror video game developed and
published by Capcom. Resident Evil 5 features similar gameplay to
Resident Evil 4, with context-sensitive controls and dynamic cut scenes
also making a return. The player can control Chris Redfield or Sheva
Alomar in a similar fashion to Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 4, with
the same over-the-shoulder perspective.

We ran the Resident Evil 5 benchmark in DX10 mode with all the image quality settings turned down, which just happens to be the default settings of the game.

This game title runs on up to four threads as you can see from the task manager shot above that was taken on a test system that was running the Intel Core i7-2820QM processor.

Benchmark Results: The differences between the processors in Resident Evil 5 was rather minor!