Supreme Commander
This game is multithreaded and can actually take advantage of more than two processor cores, making it a rare commodity indeed. We ran into some snags when we first tried to test this game with FRAPS. Getting consistent results proved difficult, and the sound didn't want to work on our Intel D975XBX2 motherboard, whose Vista x64 audio drivers may not yet be up to snuff. I was also developing the first signs of extreme RTS addiction—a grave condition indeed. I found myself analyzing unit types and lusting after level-two engineer bots. Fortunately, we were able to overcome these problems by using Supreme Commander's very nice built-in benchmark, which plays back a test game and reports detailed performance results afterward. We launched the benchmark by running the game with the "/map perftest /nosound" options. (Normally, we prefer to test games with audio enabled, but we made an exception here.) We tested at 1024x768 resolution with the game's default quality settings.

Supreme Commander's built-in benchmark breaks down its results into several major categories: running the game's simulation, rendering the game's graphics, and a composite score that's simply comprised of the other two. The performance test also reports good ol' frame rates, so we've included those, as well.

Yep, you guessed it, the QX6800 is fastest across the board. Who'd have thought? As you may have noticed, our results for the render test and the FPS numbers look to be limited somewhat by the graphics card we used. We did try testing with a GeForce 8800 GTS, as well, and still found little separation between the Core 2 Duo E6300 and the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. Next time out, we'll probably test this game in a different way to see if we can tease out larger differences between the CPUs.