Date:
Friday , July 14, 2006
Category:
CPU / Processors
Manufacturers:
Intel
Author:
Kyle Bennett

Intel Core 2 Gaming Performance

We test Intel's Core 2 Duo and Extreme using real-world gaming. Don't let a bunch of canned benchmarks lie to you about gaming performance, real gameplay experience tells a different story. Unless of course you game at 800x600.

Introduction

Let's just cut to the chase. You will see a lot of gaming benchmarks today that just simply lie to you. That is right, you will see frames per second numbers that are at best total BS, and at their worst a terrible representation of what difference a new Intel Core 2 processor will make in your gaming experience. The old ways of video game benchmarking do little to tell you about exactly how a new CPU will affect how you play your games or what experience your system supplies to you. Having more CPU power is a very cool thing, but being able to utilize it is not an easy thing to do nowadays.

This article is specific to gaming, so if you are wondering about synthetic or video and music encoding and Core 2, we have covered that as well in a separate article. Be sure that HardOCP is supplying you with the definitive information you need in order to plan your next upgrade when it comes to investing in a system to play games on.

Background and How We Tested

We started out with high hopes of using NVIDIA's new GeForce 7950 GX2 video card with our new Core 2 Duo and Extreme processor. This would allow us to use "SLI" on motherboards that did not have NVIDIA SLI chipsets, and it would allow us to use what is easily the world's most powerful single slot gaming GPU. The thought behind this was that we could remove the GPU from being the bottleneck in our testing, or get as close to that as is possible nowadays. Sadly, we ran into some issues, due to the product’s immaturity, and therefore we have used a single GeForce 7900GTX. While this is not what we wanted to do, it still is a graphics powerhouse to be dealt with, as you will see. Hopefully, a simple BIOS fix to our ASUS P5B Deluxe test system will solve the GX2 issues soon.

As alluded to above, we can easily remove the GPU as the bottleneck in the system, but this requires running low resolution benchmarks at 640x480 or 800x600, and we all know that people that are looking at buying a new processor are not using these resolutions to game at. Basing benchmarks on this old thinking will certainly show you how true processor power scales, but it does not tell you how the gamer gets to use that processor power.

Our Testing Goals

So what we have done here is employed our methods of real-world video game testing to see what exactly is the difference between gaming on Intel's newest and AMD's newest. What does real-world gaming get you with these new processors? You might be very surprised what the results look like when taken out of an old school 3dfx way of thinking and you start looking at the overall quality of performance that is delivered.

Article Contribution

Please note that Brent Justice's gameplay evaluation testing experience was utilized for this article and much of the content you see here is his hard work. I am coming in and using his evaluations and my first hand experience with Core 2 Duo, Extreme and AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 to draw my conclusions.