Yeah FSX is a good one. I would love to see some CPU scaling benchmarks for that game using Nehalem as well as C2Q/C2D.
fsx does use more than 2 cores, doesnt like sli either
its a shames toms uses fsx in the vga charts but not the cpu charts
has anyone tried the intel quadcore benchmark (the fugly one with the hovercraft) on a i7
This is kinda relative but stick with me.
Counter:Strike Source and Team Fortress 2. They aren't the hardest hitters, but in these two games it is absolutely critical to maintain at least 100 and 66 frames per second, respectively, for connection quality reasons. Their respective versions of the Source engine aren't multi-threaded (maybe TF2 is a bit but it crashes when you force it fully) and it takes a lot of ghz to do it.
servers tick at 66 updates/second and unless you have at least 66fps at all times you really can't run "cl_cmdrate 66". Many servers don't care that you are vsynced at 60 and they force 66 rates on you, so you basically play with 6 choke all the time. It's even worse in CS:S where servers tick at 100 and you need 100fps for cl_cmdrate 100. People with 100fps and 100 cmdrate/updaterate will have significantly better hit reg. My E8400 runs at 4.2ghz and I still get times in both CS:S and TF2 when my framerate dips below 100 and 66, respectively. r_3dsky 0 helps a lot though, but Valve really needs to update both games to the L4D engine where muti-threading finally works.I v-lock at 60fps in TF2 and never have any noticeable connection quality issues. But when I do get the occasional slowdown to ~30fps, reducing AA and AF and overclocking the GPU has no impact on performance -> the game is CPU limited on my 3.2GHz E6750 + GTX260 at 1440x900 with _all_ settings maxed.
servers tick at 66 updates/second and unless you have at least 66fps at all times you really can't run "cl_cmdrate 66". It's even worse in CS:S where servers tick at 100 and you need 100fps for cl_cmdrate 100. People with 100fps and 100 cmdrate/updaterate will have significantly better hit reg. My E8400 runs at 4.2ghz and I still get times in both CS:S and TF2 when my framerate dips below 100 and 66, respectively. r_3dsky 0 helps a lot though.
btw, vsync is a bad idea in Source because for example if you are synced at 60hz, if your framerate dips below that, without triple buffering it will get halved to 30, and if you had your cmdrate set to 60 to take advantage of running at 60fps, you just got 30 choke. And it always happens when it hursts you the most, in firefights. Not to mention if you cap yourself to 60fps with vsync forget about using 100 rates in CS:S. You can force triple buffering with Direct3dOverrider but the input lag is not worth it imo. I play at a high enough refresh rate not to see the tearing anymore, but with a 60hz lcd you have to pick your poison.
So will any i7 owners take up the Ice storm fighters challenge ?
Yeah i'm still waiting on that one too
Here's a helping hand to get any i7 users out there started:
http://www.intelcapabilitiesforum.net/ice_storm_fighters?m=v