BioShock
We tested BioShock by manually playing through a specific point in the game five times while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. The sequence? Me trying to fight a Big Daddy, or more properly, me trying not to die for 60 seconds at a pop.

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 largely used BioShock's default image quality settings for DirectX 10 graphics cards, but again, we tested at a relatively low resolution of 1024x768 in order to prevent the GPU from becoming the main limiter of performance.

Here's another example of a game that's not really CPU-limited, even at a relatively low resolution where the GPU shouldn't be too strained. Median low frame rates are in the low fifties from the Phenom 9500 on up, with little variance. That's a nicely playable result, obviously, but it doesn't really push the faster chips to their limits. Both the E7200 and Q9300 perform adequately, and frame rates were smooth for me in testing.

Supreme Commander
We tested performance using Supreme Commander's built-in benchmark, which plays back a test game and reports detailed performance results afterward. We launched the benchmark by running the game with the "/map perftest" option. We tested at 1024x768 resolution with the game's fidelity presets set to "High."

Supreme Commander's built-in benchmark breaks down its results into several major categories: running the game's simulation, rendering the game's graphics, and a composite score that's simply comprised of the other two. The performance test also reports good ol' frame rates, so we've included those, as well.

Supreme Commander faithfully shows us results that line up with our expectations for relative performance, but the differences between the CPUs is again negligible, with only a few frames per second at stake.