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CPU Test 1 - Artificial Intelligence
Now come the CPU tests, which look distinctly disappointing after taking in the breathtaking visuals of New Calico. The first test features a canyon filled with biplanes, all of which have to navigate through a series of gates while avoiding each other and the terrain.
The test is purely focused on the CPU’s ability to calculate path-finding AI, so it doesn’t feature any post-processing effects, complex shaders or shadows. The CPU has to guide each plane through the gates in order, and work out a physical flight model for them, while avoiding the other planes. The ideas is that faster CPUs with more cores will be able to calculate more frequent and timely movement plans for the planes, resulting in more intelligent paths.
The work is split evenly among the cores on a multi-core CPU, with a thread pool that dishes out one thread per core, and dispatching any available work to the first thread that becomes free. At the end of the test, 3DMark Vantage adds up the number of 3D paths that were calculated in the test and divides this by the number of seconds that the test took to complete. This gives 3DMark an OPS (operations per second) figure relating to path-finding AI, with which it can then calculate the final CPU score.
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