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 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.

Notice the little green plot with four lines above the benchmark results. That's a snapshot of the CPU utilization indicator in Windows Task Manager, which helps illustrate how much the application takes advantage of up to four CPU cores, when they're available. I've included these Task Manager graphics whenever possible throughout our results. In this case, Oblivon really only takes full advantage of a single CPU core, although Nvidia's graphics drivers use multithreading to offload some vertex processing chores.

I guess you could say things don't start well for the Quad FX rigs, but all of these systems can run Oblivion smoothly without breaking a proverbial sweat. You simply don't need a high-end processor to run many of today's games quite well. This one is mostly a speed contest involving one or two cores, as the dual-core Core 2 Extreme X6800's first-place finish indicates. Overall, the Intel systems sweep the top spots.

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 multithreaded, and ought to provide an illuminating look at CPU gaming performance.

For this test, we set the game to run at 800x600 resolution with high dynamic range lighting disabled. "Hardware skinning" (via the GPU) was disabled, leaving that burden to fall on the CPU. Shadow quality was set to very 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.

The Task Manager plots and the benchmark results agree: Rainbow Six: Vegas doesn't really seem to use more than two cores to any great effect (at least on the PC). Regardless, all of our test rigs are able to run the game very smoothly, with very little separation between them performance-wise.