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 frame 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, as is our usual practice. These four-way Task Manager shows won't quite show us when all eight of the dual Xeon X5365 system's cores are occupied, but believe me, you'll generally know when that happens. In this case, Oblivion really only takes full advantage of a single CPU core, although Nvidia's graphics drivers use multithreading to offload some vertex processing chores.

The Xeon X5365 system's additional CPU cores are no help to it here. It ought to perform reasonably well even in single-threaded applications because its single cores are as fast as anything else around, but perhaps its memory access overhead slows it down here. Performance is still excellent, but it's no faster than many dual- and quad-core Intel processors.

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 it 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 Xeon X5365 falls victim to a performance pitfall in this game, as well. Don't get me wrong; this thing is going to run current games very well overall, but it won't necessarily be the fastest in the benchmarks.