Gaming performanceIt?s a commonly known fact that (I hope) that almost all current games are heavily video card dependant, you don?t play games at low resolutions with a $300 video card, and if you just bought a nice an expensive SLI/Crossfire setup of $1000+ you want to turn up the eye-candy. In those cases the CPU will play a very minor role and you?ll see practically no difference in performance once you pass a certain CPU speed grade.
From HardOCP?s
CPUs & Real-World Gameplay Scaling: For our died-in-the-wool gamers that are spending a few hundred dollars or more on your high end video cards, make sure your AMD Athlon 64 processors are at least 2.4GHz in processor speed, and your Intel processors clock in at least at the 3.2GHz mark. If you let your CPUs fall below these levels, odds are that you are not using your GPU to its fullest ability.
Maybe in the future game developers will use the extra Core and horse power available to give your overall performance a boost when using a high end CPU, even when you are running at very high graphic details.
I could either show identical FPS for each configuration running the game at the resolution and quality I play them at (1600x1200 4xAA/16xAF), or lower IQ and make the games more CPU dependant. For the sake of showing an actual difference, I chose the latter.
FRAPS and a manual runthrough of the first level in Call of Duty 2 gave these numbers, average FPS:
The in-game F.E.A.R. benchmark was used, average FPS:
Hardware OC Quake 4 bench - 800*600 - id netdemo - low quality:
The Core Duo at 2.6Ghz has a hard time keeping up with the 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo, the extra 2Mb L2 cache really pays off.
Many hardware enthusiasts like to get the most out of these systems, let the overclocking begin ->
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