The graphic cards are getting more and more powerful which means that you will end up in situations where the graphic card isn’t the bottleneck, alsow in 3D-games. Game developers have become better and better with utilizing the processor performance, even with 3D-games, but the question is how much of difference it makes. At X-bit Labs they’ve published an article which tries to answer this. it has namely tested no less than 28 different processors in some of the hottest 3D-games on the market to see how they perform against eachother. The results are varying, but Athlon 64 is is without a doubt #1 when it comes to gaming.
What is really interesting is how some games show a significant gain in performance with dual core processors. Or more correct AMD’s dual core processors. Whether this is because of nVidia’s dual core graphic card drivers or simply if the game developer have done their homework is hard to tell.
