The thing is though, in the vast majority of games (including the likes of Crysis) a C2D at over 3.2ghz is fine. IMHO I wouldn't class it as "very poor", although certainly not fast either. It's probably at least as quick as a stock E6850 (the extra mhz and bus speed making up for the lower cache).
Q6600 isn't really an option any more, the price has shot up to like £135+ which is a lot to pay considering Dualies with a higher clockspeed can be had for half the price. Most games won't benefit significantly from the extra cores, and I've heard they don't clock especially well on my mobo. Unless they really slash the prices on quads I can't see myself going down that route, I'm more likely to wait for i7 to get affordable and upgrade my mobo and the same time.
The point I'm making is that it's somewhat of a shock to find a game which 'requires' a quadcore cpu (dunno if Phenom X3 might cut it?). Most games actually run faster on my type of rig (clocked C2D paired with a GTX280) compared to the Quad systems with gf8 which are creaming me in this game. Or, to put it another way and use your terminology, a 3.24ghz C2D is no more a 'very poor' cpu, than a 8800GTS is a 'very poor' gpu, yet the latter seems to fare fine.
Obviously you have to take your hats off to Rockstar for taking proper advantage of multiple cores, but you can't help but wonder why the game has such a poor fps:bling ratio. I guess this is in part due to the PS3 architecture, which has >2 cores but a relatively weak GPU.
Q6600 isn't really an option any more, the price has shot up to like £135+ which is a lot to pay considering Dualies with a higher clockspeed can be had for half the price. Most games won't benefit significantly from the extra cores, and I've heard they don't clock especially well on my mobo. Unless they really slash the prices on quads I can't see myself going down that route, I'm more likely to wait for i7 to get affordable and upgrade my mobo and the same time.
The point I'm making is that it's somewhat of a shock to find a game which 'requires' a quadcore cpu (dunno if Phenom X3 might cut it?). Most games actually run faster on my type of rig (clocked C2D paired with a GTX280) compared to the Quad systems with gf8 which are creaming me in this game. Or, to put it another way and use your terminology, a 3.24ghz C2D is no more a 'very poor' cpu, than a 8800GTS is a 'very poor' gpu, yet the latter seems to fare fine.
Obviously you have to take your hats off to Rockstar for taking proper advantage of multiple cores, but you can't help but wonder why the game has such a poor fps:bling ratio. I guess this is in part due to the PS3 architecture, which has >2 cores but a relatively weak GPU.
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