3D Games

We have already complained that quad-core processors support is not being adopted by gaming applications fast enough. The result is clearly seen on the diagrams: Core 2 Quad Q9300 is very often falling behind its dual-core competitor at default frequencies as well as during overclocking.

This situation is completely different from what we saw with previous generation processors on 65nm cores. Since Conroe and Kentsfield both overclocked to pretty similar frequencies, overclocked Core 2 Quad Q6600 ran neck and neck with overclocked Core 2 Duo E6850 even in games not optimized for quad-core. Now Core 2 Quad Q9300 cannot catch up with the overclocked Core 2 Duo E8500, so that overclocked have to face a really hard choice between a dual- and a quad-core processor.

Moreover, gaming benchmarks results reveal one more problem. During overclocking Core 2 Quad Q9300 sometimes falls not only behind its dual-core counterpart, but also behind its predecessor running at 3.6GHz frequency. This makes things even more confusing.