AMD Launches New Phenom II and Athlon II Processors

3DMark06's built-in CPU test is a multi-threaded DirectX gaming metric that's useful for comparing relative performance between similarly equipped systems.  This test consists of two different 3D scenes that are processed with a software renderer that is dependent on the host CPU's performance.  Calculations that are normally reserved for your 3D accelerator are instead sent to the CPU for processing and rendering.  The frame-rate generated in each test is used to determine the final score.

The results reported by 3DMark06's built-in CPU test were as expected. The increases frequencies of the Phenom II X4 970 and Athlon II X4 645 gave them a slight edge over lower-clocked counterparts, while the Phenom II X6 1075T dropped in just behind the faster 1090T.

3DMark Vantage's CPU Test 2 is a multi-threaded test designed for comparing relative game physics processing performance between systems.  This test consists of a single scene that features an air race of sorts, with a complex configuration of gates. There are aircraft in the test that trail smoke and collide with various cloth and soft-body obstacles, each other, and the ground. The smoke spreads, and reacts to the planes as they pass through it as well and all of this is calculated on the host CPU.

The performance trend with 3DMark Vantage's CPU Test 2 is expectedly similar to that of 3DMark06 above, but the deltas separating the chips are somewhat smaller. Still, the results are in-line with expectations.