Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[gosh]

@gosh

The Phenom used for the grid scores dont represents a standard Phenom. I remember it was clocked with 3.2 GHz and a insane (at least at this time) NB frequency of 2.7 GHz, DDR2 1100 4-4-4-5.

Ok, but Intel should win by a margin. It wins big on resolutions 1024x768 or maybe 1280x1024.
You can't clock the L3 cache also if I am right. If you look at raw processor speed Intel will win at the same clock because of the cache design. And it does win on single threaded applications, it wins big. But as soon as you go outside the processor it is loosing its advantages. And at some point depending on whats going on AMD is passing Intel.

I don't think Grid is using that much memory, PS3 cores have some specific cache that they can use but they can't go outside this. Think this is 256kb. Don't know but have read that one core is doing som filling etc for this cache so the other cores have memory that they are going to use. The key to make the PS3 fast is to use all these cores and make sure that they have fresh data.

If the game is starting to use memory and intel will need to fetch more data in memory then there will be big problems if it also need to send huge amounts of data to the GPU.
What I have seen on game tests comparing 4850 and 4870 in crossfire at very high resolutions is that they almost perform similar if it is a demanding game. That could be that the processor (Intel) isn't able to feed them with the data they can process.