Valve Source engine particle simulation
Next up are a couple of tests we picked up during a visit to Valve Software, the developers of the Half-Life games. They've been working to incorporate support for multi-core processors into their Source game engine, and they've cooked up a couple of benchmarks to demonstrate the benefits of multithreading.

The first of those tests runs a particle simulation inside of the Source engine. Most games today use particle systems to create effects like smoke, steam, and fire, but the realism and interactivity of those effects is limited by the available computing horsepower. Valve's particle system distributes the load across multiple CPU cores.

Both the Intel and AMD systems scale up nicely from two cores to four here. The Core 2 Duo E6700 is the dual-core equivalent, at 2.66GHz, of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and its performance is just about half that of the QX6700. Similarly, the Athlon 64 X2 6000+ is a single 3GHz processor, while the FX-74 system uses two of the same; the FX-74 is nearly twice as fast as the X2 6000+. The big contrast here is that the Intel processing cores execute the particle simulation much faster, so they come out on top.

Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to precompute lighting that goes into its games. This isn't a real-time process, and it doesn't reflect the performance one would experience while playing a game. It does, however, show how multiple CPU cores can speed up game development.

Again we see reasonably good scaling from two cores to four, but the Intel systems are faster overall.