Dual Core ties Quad in AoC

This last page of Age of Conan hardware guide shows a CPU comparison and I was a little suprised to see the E8400 (Dual Core 3Ghz) tie the QX9650 (Quad Core 3.0Ghz) on the FPS test in the city. The article explicity states that these in city benchmarks are CPU bound, varying the video cards did not change the numbers.

I'm suprise because the Quad CPU is the Extreme gaming version (biggest differences are three times as much L2 on CPU cache 4MB vs 12MB and Extreme friendlier to overclocking) and because AoC went though its final stages of development while multi-core systems were the standard. This seems like further evidence that games are still difficult problems to break up into threadable tasks that don't depend on each other.

Looks like the smart advice from last year still stands. If you have X dollars to spend on a CPU and your primary purpose is gaming, put the money toward a faster dual core CPU, not a lower clock speed quad core. If money's no object go for the quad but remember that clock speed is still the defining requirement for games.

I am pretty sure AOC doesn't support Quad cores. So it would only use two out of the four cores. Plus the games horribly optimized, you would get better FPS and visuals playing Crysis on high than you would get playing AOC on low.zaku101

That is so true, i have a new PC that can run Crysis in DX10 on Max with AA set to 16x set on 1920x1080 resolution at about 22FPS. I was only getting about 28FPS on AOC on low settings, the trick is to turn off the shadows. after i turned shadows off i was getting about 40FPS on max.

I am pretty sure AOC doesn't support Quad cores.zaku101

This is the truth and was the point of my OP. But it seems to imply that AoC is an exception. It's not. Games that actually use multiple cores are the rare ones. I have yet to see one that does more than say "supports quad core" on the box and actually benchmarks better.

If Age of Conan hasn't done this (new game, big development team and budget, ambitious expectations from day one, released for serious gaming hardware only) then it's not an easy nut to crack.

I'm not saying it will never happen. It'd be foolish to say that about any technological challenge. Just saying 2007 wasn't the year that hurdle was cleared and 2008 ain't looking like it either.

Benchmarks from September 2007. Note that quad cores do well on office apps and theoretical benchmarking tools, but not in actual games.

Another analysis from May 2008. Still true.

If your interested in a long technical article about the challenges coding for multiple threads, check this one. Take aways for gamers:

A. Games don't easily lend themselves to seperate threads because events (like graphics, and AI, and collisions, and physics) are dependant on each other and have to be precisely syncronized.

B. Developers have been writing single threaded code for so long and getting free performance boosts from better and better hardware. There has been little need for them to learn to write more efficient programs. Now CPUs are no longer getting faster they are getting more and more cores and programmers have to relearn how to code.