Gaming evaluation
Large caches and a high performance-per-clock-cycle have ensured that the Intel Core microarchitecture has also been strong in gaming. Far Cry is a single-threaded application and, as such, extra performance is derived by increases in pure clockspeed, rather from additional execution cores.
Quake 4 v1.30 is able to take advantage of SMP processing to provide enhanced performance. However, as the graph illustrates, the game is somewhat bottlenecked at 1024x768 with a Radeon X1900 XTX, which nullifies any advantage Intel may have in geometry processing.
Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory paints an even clearer picture. The underlying CPU is practically irrelevant when using a reasonably high-end card at 1024x768. Now, raising the resolution and quality to, say, 1920x1200 4xAA 16xAF will put the onus firmly on the graphics subsystem, even if they're SLI'd GeForce 8800 GTXs.
Does that mean that quad-core CPUs are pointless for gaming when most titles are single-threaded and performance, when set to decent levels, is restricted, in the main, by the graphics subsystem?
Considered in isolation that does appear to be the case, but the intrinsic beauty of significant parallel processing lies with the ability to run other applications in the background, to really multitask, without duly impinging on your gaming experience.
We put this assertion to the test....
