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Conclusion
Intel’s Core 2 CPU line came out dramatically ahead in our Battlefield 2142 testing. The Core 2 Extreme actually broke the 200 fps mark, outperforming the Athlon 64 FX-62 by over 28% at 800x600. In fact, the Core 2 Duo E6400 runs neck-and-neck with the FX-62, finishing just 1% behind the FX CPU. Clearly AMD has quite a bit of work to do to catch up with Intel’s latest CPUs.
We also found that having a larger L2 cache benefits frame rate by up to six percent for Core 2 CPUs, and five percent for Athlon 64 X2. At higher clock speeds (read: overclocking) the differences would probably be even greater.
Of course, these numbers come at 800x600 with no AA and AF disabled. Once you’ve got the screen resolution cranked up to 1600x1200 the graphics card begins to bottleneck performance and performance across the various systems is nearly even. The Core 2 CPUs still came out ahead but the margin separating the two is less than 2%. Once you turn on the AA/AF, the demands on the GPU are even greater and the CPU plays less of a role in performance, although interestingly enough the Core 2 CPUs managed to pull a little further away from the AMD CPUs, finishing up to 5% faster in some cases.
What lessons can be learned from this? Well, if you’ve already got a pretty good CPU, you shouldn’t be in a rush to upgrade your processor just for Battlefield 2142. If you’ve got other uses in mind then by all means proceed with your upgrade, but otherwise you’d probably be better off spending that money elsewhere, such as your graphics card. Since it’s basically built on the same engine as Battlefield 2, BF2142 doesn’t take advantage of the latest features found in today’s high-end and mainstream CPUs such as dual-core, so most single-core CPUs should suffice just fine for this game, especially if you plan on playing with AA and AF turned on, which you’re going to want to do, as BF 2142 has a fair amount of tall grass/trees and other types of foliage and the jaggies on trees/branches, etc can get pretty irritating if you like crisp visuals. So basically, while the CPU does play an important role in performance, your most important upgrade will be your GPU.
With this in mind, in our next article we’ll be taking a look at how Battlefield 2142 performs with various mainstream graphics cards. Stay tuned!
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Battlefield 2142 CPU Performance
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