Some games that have dual core support...

Age of Empires III

Black & White 2

Call of Duty 2

City of Villains by NCSoft

Doom3 by IDsoftware

F.E.A.R. by Vivendi (allegedly enabled, but real world no real performance increase to FPS, tho it still performs)

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Prey 1.2 & 1.3 by Take2

Quake 4 by IDsoftware

Quake 5 (promised when released)

Serious Sam 2 by Croteam

Splinter Cell by Tom Clancy

Supreme Commander by Gas Powered Games Corp.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (on pre-order)

The Movies

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

Unreal Engine 3

Vangauard Saga of Heros

World of Warcraft



Can you think of some more to add to the list? . . .

Probably every game released in 2006 and on will support dual core to some extent.

and I believe quite a bunch more are supported or fixing to get support via patch... so the list is growing, and any popular game in the planning is sure to have dual-core support.

Not to mention ATI's and nVidia's graphic drivers are multi-threaded giving an additional boost to dual core performance.

If you run anti-virus or software firewalls as a service, this is not an as much of a negative impact on speed, since they are multi-threaded and also benifit from dual core by running background services on the second processor...

this is good news to dual core buyers and fluid motion like gaming with all the effects on high.

Oh come on. You can't put games on the list that aren't even out. Also, F.E.A.R. does not support dual core or 64-bit. I wish it did though because I love the game.

Intel has revealed that on August 24th, 2005 that top new gaming titles such as,,, City of Villains from NCSoft, and F.E.A.R. from Vivendi are optimized for dual core processors.


Here is a good example of a 2.4GHz clocked dual core chip (represents a X2-4800 or the equivalent Opteron 180) comes amazingly close to matching the more expensive FX-55 chip? 8O
It beats a single core Athlon64 4000+ CPU at same frequency of 2.4GHz in every benchmark??? 8O

This was done over 7 months ago, and today the difference is even greater due to game patches.
The point is dual core is the better choice for gaming performance wise now and in especially in the future.
Here the margins beating single core chips at the same speed by 2% to 4% due mainly to offloading operating system tasks and allowing the game to operate uninterrupted on the other core. Now if you were to include multi-threading game patches or have the games written multi-threaded from inception, then you have the potential of 20% to 80% performance increase with dual core.











Reference...
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/c [...] 4-670.html

Where did you get the information that WoW should be included on this list?

I'm not trying to argue, but WoW is one of the games (along with Doom3) that I can't get to stop giving me problems. I'm running an x2 4800, which gave me the "benny hill stutter" in every game I played. So I fixed a few (cod2, bf2) with ms hotfixes and amdx2 drivers, but WoW (which I spend the most time playing) is still plagued. I reinstalled xp32 and (I don't understand this) bf2 and cod2 played perfectly without any patches whatsoever. But of course, WoW is still stuttering.

I really don't know what to do at this point. You don't spend $800 on a processor for mediocre performance from a game that is less demanding than others that run fine. Of course, AMD won't help. And running on the promise that patches would arrive soon enough to fix these issues, I hung on to it past the point where I could do any time of return.

Well, I'm one of those people that wishes they'd bought an FX-57 instead. Don't get me wrong, I love my x2, but like I said, would you put up with crap performance from one of the best processors that money can buy?

Anyway, where'd you get that info? I ask because I'm desperate to find a fix, seeing as how I'm stuck with this proc now. Maybe blizz made a patch that got away from me? A long shot, but I'm desperate...

dont hijack posts , start a new thread...

but that sounds more like your OS is infected with viruses/spyware or adware, rather than the games you are running i have a 4400X2(basically the same chip as you) and i have no problems...if you want to talk more start a new thread.

p.s

mod you can delete this if you want.

and nice work RichPLS..

To RichPLS, I apologize if you feel I've hijacked your thread. And to echo flakes, yes, ty for the list. I appreciate the advocacy for dual cores and gaming. Believe me, that's why I bought one.

However, I think it's a good idea to warn people of potential issues. These issues will be rectified sooner if more people are aware of them. Otherwise, the differentiating factor between the dual core crowd and the single core crowd will depend soley on who got a bunk chip and who didn't.

and flakes, sent you a pm...

Rich

Maybe I'm not understanding completely but in order to make your comment stick about dual core being the preferred game architecture now, you really need to come up with some more recent data.

If you look at the information you posted, it's even reversed in some sense. The dual core 4800+ should be able to outperform the FX-55 in case of good multi-threaded applications/games.

Designing a multi-threaded application that will really utilize multi-core processors is far from trivial and it is somewhat unlikely that games like F.E.A.R. are fully geared towards that aspect, simply because these games have been in development for years and for most of that time the developers had no access to multi core processors. They probably had a multi processor development environment which is basically the same thing when designing multi threaded applications, but multi core has its peculiarities that can really drag you down in the mud if you don't handle it right. Multi core chips share a lot of the databuses and this will have its performance penalty when you are trying to convert a multi-threaded application from being multi processor optimized to multi core optimized.

If you think a little more ahead, the Xbox360 chip has even more peculiarities in terms of the cores which aren't all the same, as well as the Cell processor (which PS3 will use), which has its own complications. In the longer run you will see a battle coming between general multi-core processors and dedicated processors like a GPU or a physics PU. What will be almost as important as the hardware will be the ease of use of the development environment and how well it will support multi-core and manage a lot of the down to earth work when handling multi threading.

Maybe we should stop a bit there because we're getting into hardware rather than gaming which is the primary focus for this forum. In short, it will take a lot more time before we will really start to see the benefits of multi core gaming, but it is coming, and it will be pushed by the industry, simply because they need a new reason for us to continue upgrading our systems or getting new ones.

Here is a more current Dual Core Benchmark
Dated Jan 2006

Once again, the Athlon64 4000+ at 2.4GHz is the bottom of the ranks in AMD chips compared to dual core.



Poor Performance with Dual Core on WinXP


Even if the game can only take advantage of one of the two cores on the X2 or Opteron dual core, either cores is certainly more than powerful enough for today’s games and equivalent to the same MHz single core mate.

Performance wise, I believe the Athlon64 X2 4800+ is the fastest overall processor on the market today. Most multi-threaded applications position the 4800+ at the top of the benchmark charts, only the Athlon64 FX-60 beats it. And the 4800+ chip is only a small amount behind the FX.
Performance wise, imo the 4800+ averages better than Intel’s dual-core Pentium-D/EE processors when handling single threaded applications, which may be of interest and something to consider regarding gamers thinking of one for the economics of the 820/920 chip.

Ok, referring to the difference between the X2 4800 and the FX-60, if the 4800 was to be oc'ed to 2.6Ghz (FX-60 spec), could you expect the same performance as you'd get from the stock FX-60? Or is there more to the FX line that makes it, well, an FX? The FX's are supposed to be AMD's premere gaming proc. Is that only because of clocks?

The only difference between the FX-60 and the Opteron 180 or the Athlon64 4800+ is the additional 200MHz of clock speed and an unlocked multiplier, every thing else is the same.

Thanks for that article. Good read.

It basically shows though that games aren't yet optimized for dual core yet (although the processors themselves are good enough to equal a single processor performance, utilizing one core) and as I said earlier it will take some doing until we will see significant optimizations appear.

I agree with your assessment. But that is no where near indicating that dual core for games is a waste. If you are an enthusiast gamer or a multi-use PC user and want the best performance, dual core is definitely the best solution to consider due to developing performance enhancements now and in the coming months. With business apps like Office and web creation, PhotoDraw, AutoCad and the likes, dual core has been integrated for years. I can not recommend a non dual core to anyone but strictly budget oriented gamers with little concern for tomorrow. Any reference that you look, if performance is the focus, dual core is at the top of the charts.

Fully agreed. I never implied (i think?) that I would not recommend buying dual core now if gaming is your favorite thing. That article you posted showed that the newer dual cores do gaming just as well. I think I remember reading some tests with the first dual cores getting out, that they actually performed worse than single core processors, which was understandable because the cores individually were inferior to the better single core processors out at the time. With the latest generation the individual cores are no longer inferior to a single core proc (right?), and tests show that the shared buses etc don't degrade performance, so all is set to just move over if you want to have the latest thing, and you get the better performance when running multiple apps as a bonus. The main concerns now are price and being future proof (for games).

HEY i thought FEAR had dual thread support. it is either THG or you that is lying to me...

F.E.A.R. does not currently does not recieve a performance increase from dual core processors.
Also think about what you're saying, "comes amazingly close to matching an FX-55" The speed difference is only 200MHz, so I would expect this in any case.

As firing squad said

Rich,

Help me out. I've read many forums on this. I can't get BF2 to work. It works in single player mode, but will not connect to a server for more than 5 seconds.

I've set the Affinity to 0 on bf2.exe. It was suggested to do the opposite on e~5000 file. I've updated pb, set bf2.exe to compatibility mode. Uninstalled and reinstalled with the new 1.21 patch. Tried high priority, low priorty.

Nothing works. Please help.

Specs:
AMD FX 60 Dual Core
NVIDIA 7900 GTX 512mb SLI
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Mobo
CORSAIR XMS PRO 2GB
WD 150GB SATA 150, 10K RPM
Windows X64

I don't have that game ;( but maybe someone will chime in...

BTW, I am envious of your system tho, It rocks!

GOT IT TO WORK!!!! No Processor Affinity change required. It works on both cores!!!

All I did was install the Special Forces Expansion pack, then it automatically patched with version 1.1, so I repatched with 1.21 and whammo, it worked!

I'm really surprised, everything is working including printer drivers.

This card is insane!! I can see like I've never seen before. The monster machine lives!!

Thanks anyway. I hope others will benefit from this if they have this problem.