Gaming evaluation
Far Cry clearly enjoys the extra bandwidth afforded to it by the QX6850 and E6750, each seeing a respectable, though not earth-shattering, improvement over its 1066MHz FSB counterpart.
Furthermore, the Core 2 Duo E6750 leads the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ by over 30fps.
Quake 4 appears to be limited somewhat by the graphics processor, even at 1024x768. Consequently, there is little variation between the Core 2 parts. Nonetheless, they still lead the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ by 15fps.
The X1900's OpenGL drivers have traditionally been fairly poor. So, had testing been carried out on an NVIDIA card with superior OpenGL performance, there might have been a more pronounced difference between the CPUs.
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As with Quake 4, Splinter Cell seems to care more about the performance of the GPU than of the CPU. Therefore, all four Intel CPUs produce near-identical results, with the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ just 5fps behind.
Since games are predominantly single-threaded and limited by the graphics card's processor, not the CPU, they won't let you enjoy big benefits from quad-core CPUs.
The same is true, of course, for many of the applications used on a day-to-day basis, so let's take a look at what happens to performance when you start doing a few things at once...
