Gaming Tests

And finally some gaming benchmarks, the favorite review page for all gamers. Five popular and new titles are chosen to represent every game genre. Far Cry 2 and Section 8 for FPS gamers, Resident Evil 5 for adventure gamers, HAWX and GTR Evolution for simulation gamers. GTR Evolution is a bit older but it shows how it is done when it comes to using multiple cores on a CPU.

In game quality details for all resolutions are set to following:

• Tom Clancy's HAWX v1.1 - high details
• Resident Evil 5 benchmark - medium details
• Section 8 v1.0 - high details
• GTR Evolution v1.0 - high details, Level 1 AA
• Far Cry 2 v1.3 - DirectX 10, High Detail

Today's games work best with 2+ core CPU's, and higher the clocks the better. Following that logic, there really is no space for single core CPU's in gaming world left. It's not that the Sempron is bad at games, quite the contrary, it manages to push frame rates above comfort limit in almost all the tests, but it bottlenecks HD 4890 video card used even in lowest resolutions. Pairing up Sempron with anything stronger than HD 4670 or 9600 GT really makes no sense... unless you can unlock the second core that is.

AMD's current generation improvements to gaming performance can clearly be seen on our Sempron 140. It manages to provide frames on par with the dual core Celeron E1600 and offers almost double the performance of Celeron 430.

Far Cry 2

Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.

Resident Evil 5

GTR Evolution

Section 8