SMP-enabled Gaming Benchmarks
 

Until recently, threading has been one of those “Meh, whatever” features for game enthusiasts. And the prospect of losing precious megahertz due to yield considerations made the idea even less attractive, never mind the very real performance gains in optimized applications such as Microsoft Media Encoder 9. But according to AMD, gamers who’re into today’s games won’t want to sacrifice frame rate for the possibility of better performance down the road, which is why its current flagship, the Athlon 64 FX-57, persists as a single-core powerhouse wielding plenty of clock speed.

Of course, now that multi-core hardware is both available and affordable, plenty of software will inevitably follow, right? Well, I still haven’t seen any games written with threading in mind and I do know that the development costs of a multi-threaded game are substantially higher. Not promising.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...e_performance/

pretty goodlooking...
however, we all like to play games in higher resolution, and hi-res is still dominated by GPUpower ofcourse.
however 1280*1024results look pretty spectacular

I downclocked my fx53 back from 2.8ghz to 2.4 ghz, since it made 3fps difference globally when playing at anything higher than 1280*1024 4*fsaa, 16*af, and dual 7800gtx's aren't made for anything less then highest iq settings with antialiasing

it's more somethign about futureproofness (UT2007 is supposed to support it as well)


Of course, only provided PCIE stays with us long enough which should be the case as I do not see Nvidia and ATI enjoying the additional costs of keeping cards for both interfaces caused by the switch to PCIE.