Team Fortress 2
We'll kick off our gaming tests with some Team Fortress 2, Valve's class-driven multiplayer shooter based on the Source game engine. In order to produce easily repeatable results, we've tested TF2 by recording a demo during gameplay and playing it back using the game's timedemo function. In this demo, I'm playing as the Heavy Weapons Guy, with a medic in tow, dealing some serious pain to the blue team.

We used a relatively low display resolution with low levels of filtering and AA in order to prevent the graphics card from becoming a primary performance bottleneck, so we could show you the performance differences between the CPUs. We tested at 1024x768 resolution with the game's detail levels set to their highest settings. HDR lighting and motion blur were enabled. Antialiasing was disabled, and texture filtering was set to trilinear filtering only.

Notice the little green plot with four lines above the benchmark results. That's a snapshot of the CPU utilization indicator in Windows Task Manager, which helps illustrate how much the application takes advantage of up to four CPU cores, when they're available. I've included these Task Manager graphics whenever possible throughout our results. In this case, Team Fortress 2 looks like it probably only takes full advantage of a single CPU core, although Nvidia's graphics drivers use multithreading to offload some vertex processing chores.

Our first test is a single-threaded game, and it illustrates nicely the dilemma posed by the Phenom X3. The 8750 is every bit as fast as the more expensive Phenom X4 9750 because it runs at the same clock frequency. Dropping a core simply doesn't hurt here—not a bad tradeoff. On the other hand, the Phenom X3 8450 has trouble keeping pace with the rest of the pack because of its combination of low clock speeds and per-clock performance. The 8450's additional core is of no use, and the similarly priced Athlon 64 X2 5600+ outperforms it.

Unfortunately for AMD, all of this product positioning banter seems strangely academic when the Core 2 Duo E7200 outruns anything AMD has to offer. The single-core/single-threaded performance of the Phenom simply isn't up to the standard set by Intel's Core 2 processors right now.

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Lost Planet puts the latest hardware to good use via DirectX 10 and multiple threads—as many as eight, in fact. Lost Planet's developers have built a benchmarking tool into the game, and it tests two different levels: a snow-covered outdoor area with small numbers of large villains to fight, and another level set inside of a cave with large numbers of small, flying creatures filling the air. We'll look at performance in each.

We tested this game at 1152x864 resolution, largely with its default quality settings. The exceptions: texture filtering was set to trilinear, edge antialiasing was disabled, and "Concurrent operations" was set to match the number of CPU cores available.

Lost Planet's Snow test is pretty much graphics-bound and so not terribly interesting to us, except to offer the lesson that in some games, any reasonably good CPU will do. The Cave level, meanwhile, shows us the other side of the triple-core compromise. This test puts multiple cores to good use, and as a result, the Phenom X3 8450 delivers higher frame rates than the Core 2 Duo E7200. The X3 8750, though, still can't quite catch the Core 2 Duo E8400, whose two execution cores combine higher frequencies with strong clock-for-clock throughput.