The purpose of this article is to highlight the processor dependance of next generation graphics card. Therefore we used nine different 3D benchmarks. We therefore compared four processor generations ranging from the Pentium 4 to the Core 2 Duo, the Core i7 920 and a very recent Core i7 2600K. For comparison purposes all CPUs run at 3.0 GHz and to be sure that there is no bottleneck in the graphical subsystem we used a Radeon HD 6990.






In 2006, Intel released its Core2Duo, a dual core processor that smashed single core processors regarding the performance in both 2D and 3D. Indeed, Intel as well as AMD saw that it was no more possible to continue increasing the CPU. One major problem back then were power leakages which forced the semiconductor companies to find new ways in getting more performance out of CPUs. The Pentium 4 therefore was the last processor that was built with the highest possible clock speed in mind no matter how inefficient the pipeline was. After Pentium 4 the industry began to focus and CPU designs which had a better performance per MHz ratio than the previous generations. Another way to provide more computing power were multi core designs. Within the past years CPUs have been designed which natively support up to six and even more cores. Paired up with techologies like SMT (Symmetric Multithreading) an operating system can see up to twelve and more threads. Such a quick development had the consequence that software needed to be reprogrammed. The sequential algorithms needed to be improved and all the large software companies started to optimize their applications for multithreaded environments based on multi core CPUs. Today, four years after the Core 2 Duo was introduced, two CPU generations later, ... It's time to test.

More than 50 percent of gamers still use a Core 2 Duo for gaming. Indeed, games weren't always optimised for quad core CPUs and those were expensive that's one reason why it was recommended to buy a dual core processor with higher frequency to get better performance. Is it still true nowadays?
Well, that's why we wrote this article using a Pentium 4, a Core 2 Duo E8400, which is going to mark the 100 percent performance index and of course the most we also took a Core i7 920 as well a s an i7 2900K. All the CPUs were running at 3.0 GHz clock speed. Because this article aims at gamers, we need a powerful graphic cards. In this case we chose AMDs latest monster aka Radeon HD 6990 to be sure not to be limited by the graphics card.
We expanded our benchmarks to test every type of games. Again we have Futuremarks' benchmarks, FPS, RTS, RPG and finally a racing game under two different presets 1280 x 1024 Medium and 1920x1080 High.