Valve Source engine particle simulation
Next up are a couple of tests we picked up during a visit to Valve Software, the developers of the Half-Life games. They've been working to incorporate support for multi-core processors into their Source game engine, and they've cooked up a couple of benchmarks to demonstrate the benefits of multithreading.

The first of those tests runs a particle simulation inside of the Source engine. Most games today use particle systems to create effects like smoke, steam, and fire, but the realism and interactivity of those effects are limited by the available computing horsepower. Valve's particle system distributes the load across multiple CPU cores.

There's good and bad news in these results. The good news is that the Phenom 9900 at 2.6GHz outruns the two Athlon 64 FX-74 processors at 3.0GHz, a nice gain in performance per clock. The bad news is that the Phenom 9600 is well behind its would-be competition, the Core 2 Quad Q6600.

Valve VRAD map compilation
This next test processes a map from Half-Life 2 using Valve's VRAD lighting tool. Valve uses VRAD to precompute lighting that goes into games like Half-Life 2. This isn't a real-time process, and it doesn't reflect the performance one would experience while playing a game. Instead, it shows how multiple CPU cores can speed up game development.

The story is much the same here as it was in the last test. The Phenom brings some nice gains for AMD, but they're not quite enough at current clock speeds to catch the Core 2 Quad Q6600.