The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We tested Oblivion by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

For this test, we set Oblivion's graphical quality to "Medium," but with HDR lighting enabled and vsync disabled, at 800x600 resolution. We've chosen this relatively low display resolution in order to prevent the graphics card from becoming a bottleneck, so differences between the CPUs can shine through.

Obviously, both CPUs deliver more-than-playable frame rates when the graphics card isn't a bottleneck, but you may be surprised by how close the contest is. There's only three frames per second worth of difference between the lowest frame rate from the E6700 and the lowest from the X2 6000+.

Rainbow Six: Vegas
Rainbow Six: Vegas is based on Unreal Engine 3 and is a port from the Xbox 360. For both of these reasons, it's one of the first PC games that's widely multithreaded, and ought to provide an illuminating look at CPU gaming performance.

For this test, we set the game to run at 1024x768 resolution with high dynamic range lighting enabled. "Hardware skinning" (via the GPU) was disabled, leaving that burden to fall on the CPU. Shadow quality was set to low, and motion blur was enabled at medium quality. I played through a 90-second sequence of the game's Terrorist Hunt mode on the "Dante's" level five times, capturing frame rates with FRAPS, as we did with Oblivion.

This one is even closer than Oblivion, with the X2 6000+ delivering the highest average framerate and the E6700 avoiding the lows a little better.