Borderlands
This is my favorite game in a long, long time, so I had to use in it our latest CPU test suite. Borderlands is based on Unreal Engine technology and includes built-in speed test, which we used here. We tested with the game set to its highest quality settings at a range of resolutions. The results from the lowest resolutions will highlight the separation between the CPUs best, so I'd pay the most attention to them. The higher resolution results demonstrate what happens when the GeForce GTX 260 graphics card begins to restrict frame rates.

The GPU bottleneck serves to limit the disparities between the CPUs somewhat as the display resolution increases, but in this case, its impact isn't especially dramatic. The finishing order changes little from one resolution to the next, and the frame rates hardly change at all in the bottom half of the pack. If you're primarily concerned with relative CPU performance, you'll want to focus on our lowest-resolution results.

Those show us that the Core i3-530 is a little faster in this game than the Athlon II X4 635, although the X4 635's frame rates still average in the 50's, which should be plenty fast. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the minimum frame rates in this particular case; they don't seem to be primarily determined by CPU speed, and they all fall within the same basic range.

I've been saying for ages that most of today's games will run well on just about any desktop processor. That's true in part because most games are co-developed for game consoles, whose CPUs are weaker than, well, me trying to climb the rope in gym class. Still, in the Pentium 4 670, we have finally found a processor that can't run a contemporary game well. The Q6600 has no trouble, though.

I have two more things to note about Borderlands. One, this game doesn't seem to benefit from having more than two cores available. The Core 2 Duo E8600 outperforms the Q9400, for instance, and all of the Athlon II chips hit similar frame rates. Two, the Phenom II processors appear to get a nice boost out of their L3 caches. The Athlon II chips suffer by comparison.