Team Fortress 2
We'll kick off our gaming tests with some Team Fortress 2, Valve's class-driven multiplayer shooter based on the Source game engine. In order to produce easily repeatable results, we've tested TF2 by recording a demo during gameplay and playing it back using the game's timedemo function. In this demo, I'm playing as the Heavy Weapons Guy, with a medic in tow, dealing some serious pain to the blue team.

We tested at 1024x768 resolution with the game's detail levels set to their highest settings. HDR lighting and motion blur were enabled. Antialiasing was disabled, and texture filtering was set to trilinear filtering only. We used this relatively low display resolution without lots of filtering and AA in order to prevent the graphics card from becoming a primary performance bottleneck, so we could show you the performance differences between the CPUs.

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, Team Fortress looks like it probably only takes full advantage of a single CPU core, although Nvidia's graphics drivers use multithreading to offload some vertex processing chores.

The Core 2 QX6850 comes out of the gate fast, taking the lead in our first game test. Obviously, with the slowest score reaching down to over 70 frames per second, any of these processors will run TF2 more than adequately. The QX6850 just runs it, err, adqeuatest.

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition
Lost Planet puts the latest hardware to good use via DirectX 10 and multiple threads—as many as eight, in the case of our dual quad-core Xeon test rig. Lost Planet's developers have built a benchmarking tool into the game, and it tests two different levels: a snow-covered outdoor area with small numbers of large villains to fight, and another level set inside of a cave with large numbers of small, flying creatures filling the air. We'll look at performance in each.

We tested this game at 1152x864 resolution, largely with its default quality settings. The exceptions: texture filtering was set to trilinear, edge antialiasing was disabled, and "Concurrent operations" was set to match the number of CPU cores available.

The most exciting result here, by far, is the "Cave" level. As you can see from both the Task Manager output and the benchmark results, we have an actual game that benefits from the presence of more than two processor cores. Lost Planet puts a cubic assload of flying doodads onscreen at once in the Cave scene, and they're tracked and animated by multiple threads. Given that very friendly environment, the QX6850 excels, topping the quad-core systems and blowing away the dual-core contenders.