Athlon II X4 640 vs. Core i3 530 CPU Review

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 is a DirectX 9 game implementing high-dynamic range (HDR) and its own physics engine, which is used to calculate how objects interact. For example, if you shoot, what exactly will happen to the object when the bullet hits it? Will it break? Will it move? Will the bullet bounce back? It gives a more realistic experience to the user.

We ran this game at 1440×900 resolution, disabling anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering and setting texture quality to the minimum. We used the game internal benchmarking feature, running a demo provided by NVIDIA called wetwork. We are putting this demo for downloading here if you want to run your own benchmarks. The game was updated to version 1.7. We ran this test five times, discarding the lowest and the highest scores. The results below are an arithmetic average of the three remaining values, given in frames per second (FPS).

The Core i3-530 integrated video processor proved to be 41% faster than the video processor provided by the AMD 890GX chipset. However, the number of frames per second achieved was very low even with all image quality settings reduced to their minimum values, and therefore it is almost impossible to play this game with integrated video solutions.

When we installed a “real” video card (Radeon HD 5670), the Core i3-530 was a tiny bit faster (4%) than the Athlon II X4 640.