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Reviews - Budget gaming
Beyond a certain amount of processing power, CPUs don't make that much difference to the performance of most games. Unless you're a lover of Flight Sim X, Armed Assault or Football Manager, your CPU takes a back seat to your graphics card. This point is proved by the brilliant £700 Chillblast Sniper gaming PC. However, we wanted to make this point clearer, so as well as introducing new application benchmarks, we also have a new gaming benchmark for motherboards, PCs and laptops. Here's how we chose the new test.
To be of any use, the game would have to be CPU-intensive and fairly modern. Our first candidate was Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, with its wide-open vistas of complex, modelled vegetation giving the CPU a tough workout. However, after a couple of days of benchmarking different areas of Tamriel, we found some inconsistency in the results from runs on the same hardware - this was hardly ideal for the definitive verdicts we aim to deliver.
Next up was Medieval II: Total War. We recorded a battle between the Aztecs (for loads of geometrically constructed troops) and the Monguls (for anachronistic fun). Viewing this using the rerun battle function would ensure consistency of workload but, unfortunately, the camera of the playback is user-guided. You're either stuck watching nothing, or you introduce human error by moving the camera to watch the fight. Finally, we settled on the in-game benchmark of Supreme Commander. This has three main benefits: your scores will be comparable with ours; there's consistency between runs (if you run the test three times, as we do, and disregard the anomalous result); and it's a multithreaded game that puts a heavy load on a modern CPU. However, there's only a difference of 1fps between our Core 2 Duo running at 2.66GHz and 3.66GHz, so even this game doesn't respond well to increased CPU performance. We expected more, given the rumours, but it only proves the point that gaming performance generally benefits from GPU rather than CPU performance.
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