Dual Core or Single Core for games?

[Caxus]

I currently have a socket 754 Athlon 64 3200. I'm thinking of upgrading to a 939 Athlon 3700 San Diego but some people are telling me to get a dual core processor. Now I understand that dual core processors are great for multitasking but for someone like me who mostly uses his computer for games, is there any point in dropping the extra cash? It was my understanding that dual cores did absolutely nothing for games.

[shwaip]

some games support it (Quake 4, Oblivion, others I'm sure) now. I assume that more future games will start to do so. I guess it depends on how long you want to wait in between your upgrades. I'd probably get the dual core because I tend to do a lot of encoding-type activities and for the cool factor.

[Caxus]

I have to admit, this upgrade has been prompted by the release of oblivion but i'm almost certain that it does not make use of dual cores. Have you read otherwise?

[Mt_Goat]

You can count on more games supportin dual core to be released before the year is out. I would go for it. You will also be able to get the same OC out of a dual core CPU as the 3700 you mentioned. Oh yea, of course it will be X2. :)

[shwaip]

google search for "oblivion dual core" and 4 clicks later...

Oblivion will absolutely benefit from a multi-processor or multi-core PC architecture. These improvements have largely been driven by our optimizations for the Xbox 360 hardware. We have built a dynamic thread management system that manages processor load by our specific direction and by priorities. Portions of physics, AI, loading, audio, and rendering tasks can all be moved to different threads to keep the overall load balanced. The net result for the end user is a smoother experience.

and tweakguides says yes as well...

http://www.tweakguides.com/Oblivion_13.html

[rapture]

As shwaip says, there are quite a few multithreaded tweaks which the engine is capable of running.

Also remember that it was developed for the xbox 360...