Real Time Strategy Benchmarks
First Person Shooters may be what everyone uses for benchmarks, but it’s not the be all and end all for gaming genres. You tend to see a little more CPU usage from strong RTS titles due to the AI and unit management required. At least that’s the theory. We going to test it with two titles; one was patched DX10 a while back, and one is a DX9 title that can bring a DX10-style system crushing to your rig. Let’s go.
And here’s where my theory falls apart. Company of Heroes was one of the first titles released under the “Games for Windows” umbrella, and was originally a DX9 title. A DX10 patch was later release, and it provided some graphical enhancements. The game also comes with a built in benchmark where you can compare your DX9 and DX10 performance among other things. For our tests, we focused exclusively on DX10. For this benchmark we once again maxed out all the settings, set anti-aliasing to 4x, and cranked the resolution to 1680×1050.
Our results didn’t amount to much. We overclocked the processor and poked and prodded at the TLB erratum fix, but there was very little performance difference from normal. At best we were able to muster only 1.5% plus or minus, which in the area of benchmarks is once again statistically insignificant. Hopefully our next title will prove more of a challenge.
Supreme Commander is a very large, overarching RTS game. Though it may be a DX9 title, many of the effects within the game are DX10 inspired if not driven. Due to the nature of this game, it brutalizes your CPU, GPU, memory, and hard drive. This make it’s a great testing platform for any upstart CPU. Since we’re trying to squeeze out some good numbers for our charts, we decided to once again crank the settings to maximum, apply some 4x anti-aliasing loving, and ramp up the resolution to 1680×1050. As for the game itself, Supreme Commander has an internal benchmark that plays out a full battle scenario for you in real time. This benchmark measures all the aspects of your system perform, and produces a composite score not unlike 3DMark06 and PCMark05.
The numbers for our final benchmark definitely followed the trend started by our first benchmark. There was a performance increase when the processor was overclocked as far as it could, and at 7% it was definitely close to that afore mentioned percent-for-percent goal of 8% I’m looking for. As for the TLB erratum fix, when enabled it resulted in a whopping 28% drop in overall performance in game. This is just staggering, and it caused me to rerun the benchmark several times to be sure. Unfortunately it was true, as I could see the lag in the benchmark as it was happening.
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