Gaming comparison with Multi Core Processors: XP vs Vista - Which is really better?
The HardOCP gang puts XP and Vista through the paces using Supreme Commander

We all want the best gaming experience possible in the games we play. There are two primary hardware factors which attribute to improving the gameplay experience; the video card (GPU) and the processor (CPU) in your system. The most current and powerful video cards that exist today for gamers, are the NVIDIA GeForce 8 series of GPUs, most notably the flagship GeForce 8800 GTX video card. The GeForce 8800 GTX supports the new DirectX 10 API native to Windows Vista. It also produces the best performance we have ever seen in computer video games to date. This is only bested by configuring two 8800 GTX in SLI. The GeForce 8800 series GPU power will allow you to increase in-game quality settings as well as resolution, antialiasing (AA) and anisotropic filtering (AF) which improves visual quality creating a more immersive gaming experience. As such, the video card has the potential to greatly affect your gameplay experience.

However, that potential is only realized when another component of your computer is fast enough to allow the video card to work at its peak efficiency, that is your CPU. The CPU controls several aspects of the game including geometry setup to varying degrees, physics, artificial intelligence (AI), and sound. It is also responsible for keeping the rest of your system running while you are playing the game. If it is not fast or powerful enough, it will choke the video card and become a bottleneck, disallowing the video card to meet its potential in your game. The CPU therefore does carry a great burden for the overall gameplay experience. Today though most games are GPU-limited, meaning that we very rarely seeing gameplay inhibited by today’s more power desktop processors.

With the introduction of multi-core processors, the CPU is evolving into a powerhouse capable to do more tasks at once then it has ever done. There are applications which benefit from multi-core CPUs, and up until now most of those have been mostly related to server tasks or specialized desktop applications. Desktop multi-core CPU advantages haven’t been realized until the last couple of years as more people are doing more activities on their computer at one time instead of simply doing a single task. While the advantages of multi-core processors are showing themselves for desktop use now, gaming support for multi-core processors has been severely lacking.

Up until now games have been mostly single-threaded. This means that they are only capable of taking advantage of a single-core on the CPU. If you have dual or quad-core processors the game will not utilize those extra cores efficiently to provide any gameplay experience improvements. Therefore multi-core CPUs have been pointless for gaming. Times are changing though, and we are finally seeing the evolution of gaming take on the advantages that can be had from utilizing multi-core CPUs.

Read all about it here, courtesy of hardocp.com

Eric