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 with low levels 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 2 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 QX9650 produces some very nice clock-for-clock performance gains right off the bat. Yow. All of these CPUs are pushing acceptable frame rates for TF2, but the QX9650 is in a class by itself in terms of raw performance. If you want future-proofing, this puppy has it.

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.

As I've stated before—and watch me do it again—Lost Planet's Cave level is exciting because it puts a cubic assload of flying doodads on the screen and uses multiple threads to control them all. That gives us a nice look at how quad-core processors can speed up a game. Oddly, the QX9650 stumbles just a little bit in the Snow level, for whatever reason, but in the Cave level with all of those doodads, it's well ahead of the pack—and roughly 10% faster than its 3GHz 65nm counterpart.