Contemporary CPUs and New Games

Omega65

Xbitlabs has a two part article that tests 28 CPUs (and also 1GB vs 2GB configs) using 5 popular games. Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2, F.E.A.R., Quake 4 and Serious Sam 2. The CPUs range from the Athlon 64 4000+ to the Pentium EE 840.

View: Part I - Part II

Now the situation has changed a lot. Graphics processor developers released new driver versions that can support multi-threading, and game developers began to modify their engines so that they could take good advantage of dual-core architectures. As we see, new shooters based on gaming engines from id Software can already use the power of two processor cores. Since these gaming engines are among the most popular nowadays, Quake 4 and call of Duty 2 may very soon become far not the only ones using dual-core. Moreover, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if some other gaming engines also acquire dual-core support: progress keeps going forward.

Dual Core is the Future and the Future is Now! Although untested, the S939 Opteron 165 CPU (Dual Core 2x1MB 1.8ghz) can be had currently for ~$300. It's your easiest entrance into high performance computing. Especially when OC'd to 2.3 - 2.5ghz with a suitable motherboard.

Source: Xbitlabs