Unreal Tournament 3
As you saw on the preceding page, I did manage to find a couple of CPU-limited games to use in testing. I decided to try to concoct another interesting scenario by setting up a 24-player CTF game on UT3's epic Facing Worlds map, in which I was the only human player. The rest? Bots controlled by the CPU. I racked up frags like mad while capturing five 60-second gameplay sessions for each processor.

Oh, and the screen resolution was set to 1280x1024 for testing, with UT3's default quality options and "framerate smoothing" disabled.

We're looking at playable frame rates with pretty much every processor tested, but we do seem to have sorted out the faster CPUs from the slower ones. Notice that the dual-core processors don't fare as well here; some degree of multithreading seems to be at work.

All of the Core i7 processors finish strong, even the 920. However, the 940's victory over the 965 Extreme is a reminder of how much variability is possible when testing in this manner.

Half Life 2: Episode Two
Our next test is a good, old custom-recorded in-game timedemo, precisely repeatable.

Ok, so we have frame rates well into the hundreds, but at least Episode Two's ceiling is high enough to show us the differences between the CPUs. Clock for clock, the Core i7 doesn't look to be much faster than the Core 2 here.

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

This test 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.

Chalk up a win for Hyper-Threading now that we have a nicely multithreaded application, and consider the Core i7's dominance here. Even the 920 is faster than the Skulltrail dual-QX9775 system with its eight Penryn cores.