Valve Source engine particle simulation
Next up are a couple of tests we picked up during a visit to Valve Software, the developers of the Half-Life games. They've been working to incorporate support for multi-core processors into their Source game engine, and they've cooked up a couple of benchmarks to demonstrate the benefits of multithreading.

The first of those tests runs a particle simulation inside of the Source engine. Most games today use particle systems to create effects like smoke, steam, and fire, but the realism and interactivity of those effects are limited by the available computing horsepower. Valve's particle system distributes the load across multiple CPU cores.

Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to precompute lighting that goes into its games. This isn't a real-time process, and it doesn't reflect the performance one would experience while playing a game. It does, however, show how multiple CPU cores can speed up game development.

We should probably pause to consider another factor that hasn't changed much: the E6750 is still miles ahead of AMD's top dual-core processor, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+.