Pacific Fighters

Pacific Fighters

Notes

Flight sims are the most CPU-intensive game genre out there, so it was a no-brainer for us to test with Pacific Fighters, which has been patched to take advantage of SM 3.0’s vertex texture fetch feature to improve the game’s water. Here we can see where Intel’s new Core 2 CPUs really shine, with the Core 2 Duo E6400 even pulling away from AMD’s flagship Athlon 64 FX-62! Even at 1600x1200, a resolution you’d normally expect to be GPU-bound in, the C2D E6400 comes out ahead.

The AMD CPUs used to thoroughly own in this benchmark, outperforming even the fastest Pentium EE CPUs by margins of around 20-30% overall. Now Intel’s Core 2 CPUs are beating the FX-62 by a similar amount if not greater (depending on the Core 2 CPU).