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AMD Dual Core vs. AMD Single Core

Well, all drivers from ATI and Nvidia are dual core optimised now arent they :).

3ghz ona dual core is pretty hefty though!!. lot easier to do on a single core.

Tom
 
PinkFloyd said:
Yeh its nice to see that so all those people saying "don't buy a dual core if you play games" definetly don't have any evidence (not that they had any anyway...)
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I found it depends on the game largely. If you also play older games like I do (q3 engine games mostly) there is a performance drop. However, If you're playing just the newer games like fear, bf2 and quake 4 then you'll probably experience no problems and see the benefit of dual core. I'll go dual core once I give up the ghost on those games.
 
james.miller said:
all those tests showed there was no difference in gaming unless your running dual core AND sli. i cant afford either so my 3ghz opty keeps me happy:)
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That's because without SLI, you're GPU, not CPU limited in most cases.

If you're GPU limited then dual core will make very little difference to performance.

SLI tends to throw the situation to being CPU limited, and therefore dual core (provided the game can try and take advantage of it) provides a good advantage in that situation.

There's a couple of really good articles on Oblivion over at Anandtech looking at where it's CPU/GPU limited and what sort of performance effect each part has.

GPU Article

CPU Article
 
PinkFloyd said:
Yeh its nice to see that so all those people saying "don't buy a dual core if you play games" definetly don't have any evidence (not that they had any anyway...)
Click to expand...

Odd. I've found it's made me happy to stick with single core.

In fact, if I had £205 to spend on a CPU for gaming, I'd go with a 2.4Ghz single core over the 2.0Ghz dual core... (they are both currently £205 @ OcUK).

I estimate a dual-core needing to be ~2.3Ghz to equal a single core 2.4Ghz (~15% looking at those CPU scaling graphs in the link).

I don't doubt dual core is the future, but right now (and for the next 6 months, maybe more), you get more bang for buck with single core in (most) games.

Thanks Minstadave for the link!
 
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