Quad vs Dual Cores for Gaming
It seems like a lot of people are wondering what they should buy once the Intel price drop hits and Intel's new processors come out. The chaps over at VE decided to ask Epic Games' Main Man and Lead Programmer Tim Sweeney for his take on the situation:
VE - Assuming you were making a new rig to run today and tomorrow's games, which CPU would you recommend at the $266 price point? A Quad-core Q6000 2.4GHz or Dual-Core E6850 3.0GHz?
Tim -f you're buying a CPU primarily for gaming, the sweet spot of the market seems to be dual-core. There, you can get a higher clock rate than is available (at least economically) in quad-core. All UE3 games, for example, scale really well to two cores, and you get significantly more performance than single-core much of the time. Though UE3 and many other engines scale somewhat to 4 cores, the benefits aren't huge.
That will change in a couple of years, but that's another upgrade cycle.
If you plan to do heavy level-building and mod making, I'd recommend quad-core. The development tools scale well to quad-core, having lots of content authoring apps open in Windows benefits from quad-core, and if you're going to be running a dedicated server on your machine to test a mod while also playing on that machine, it helps for that.
VE - Assuming you were making a new rig to run today and tomorrow's games, which CPU would you recommend at the $266 price point? A Quad-core Q6000 2.4GHz or Dual-Core E6850 3.0GHz?
Tim -f you're buying a CPU primarily for gaming, the sweet spot of the market seems to be dual-core. There, you can get a higher clock rate than is available (at least economically) in quad-core. All UE3 games, for example, scale really well to two cores, and you get significantly more performance than single-core much of the time. Though UE3 and many other engines scale somewhat to 4 cores, the benefits aren't huge.
That will change in a couple of years, but that's another upgrade cycle.
If you plan to do heavy level-building and mod making, I'd recommend quad-core. The development tools scale well to quad-core, having lots of content authoring apps open in Windows benefits from quad-core, and if you're going to be running a dedicated server on your machine to test a mod while also playing on that machine, it helps for that.
