A8-3850 vs. Core i3-2100 CPU Review

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a very popular DirectX 9 game that was released in 2010. Though this game uses an old version of DirectX, the number of textures that can be represented on one screen can push most of the top-end graphics cards to their limits (especially when the graphics settings are set at “Ultra”). StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty uses its own physics engine that is bound to the CPU and thus does not benefit from PhysX.

We tested this game at 1440×900. The quality of the game was set to the “high” preset, disabling both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. We then used FRAPS to collect the frame rate of a replay on the “Unit Testing” custom map. We used a battle between very large armies to stress the video cards.

Here the integrated graphics processor of the A8-3850 was 66% faster than Core i3-2100’s. In fact, the performance achieved by the new AMD CPU will allow you to play this game at the published settings at a very good performance.

A GeForce GT 430 proved to be 24% faster than the integrated video of the A8-3850. The same video card was 112% faster than the integrated video of the Core i3-2100.