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.

TF2 doesn't gain anything from the addition of more than two cores, it seems, and so the Phenoms don't provide much of a performance boost over the Athlon 64 X2. The Phenom does gain some per-clock performance, though not as much as initially expected from the K10 design.

Living in the now, the Phenom 9600 is slower than the Core 2 Quad Q6600 here, although it's easily up to the task of running this game fluidly.

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.

We're pretty much looking at a GPU bottleneck or something similar in the "Snow" level, where all of the processors are bunched together at around 95 FPS. The Cave level is more intriguing, since it puts four cores to good use. Here, the Phenom 9600 just edges out the Core 2 Quad Q6600, and the Phenom 9900 puts in a respectable showing on a clock-for-clock basis versus the quad-core Intel CPUs.