Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Dual-Core Processors in 3D Games

As dual-core processors have been actively spreading in the market for the last years, multi-processing features are appearing in games and other non-professional applications. Dual-core processors have been rarely used in desktop computers up to now. They were mostly employed by professionals and rare enthusiasts, who worked with such applications as 3D modeling and rendering, as well as media processing and encoding, which were initially designed to support several CPUs.
Games offered weak support (or even no support) for two and more processors, because multi-processor systems were not popular among gamers because of their high price. A couple of years ago there started to appear mass-scale dual-core processors, but their price was too high for a common user for some time. So they were again bought by enthusiasts, only on a larger scale. With the launch of Intel Pentium D, as well as Core 2 Duo and AMD Athlon 64 X2, both companies that manufacture desktop x86 CPUs significantly dropped prices for their processors and still do it from time to time. As a result, dual-core processors are only a little more expensive than single-core models. Besides, x86 processors develop towards multi-cores.


Test include:
Processors: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ and AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Socket 939
Motherboard: Foxconn WinFast NF4SK8AA-8KRS (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI)
RAM: 2048 MB DDR SDRAM PC3200
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB
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