As you can clearly see, even a high end computer like our reference system can't stand up to either of these two giants. For gaming, the single card solution is no match for the NVIDIA SLI enabled systems from AAC and Falcon Northwest. As Quakecon 2005 attendees can attest, they get their product decision choices from seeing the doubling and tripling of scores instead of 30-60% performance increase with the addition of a second graphics card.

The most interesting results are seen in Unreal Tournament 2004, which is a CPU limited game, thus the small deviation in the frames per second as resolutions and rendering options are applied. The X2 system with the added second card and 900 MHz CPU handicap outperforms the reference system by 40+ frames per second. The AAC Liquid XS pulls ahead of the reference system by 60 frames per second. Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 showed the power of multi-threaded code at its best. Both of these games perform better with the 300 MHz handicap to that of the FX-57 system, but make up for it in extra core horsepower.

Dual core will be the way of the future, but we are still waiting on applications and drivers to fully support the added capabilities. In the short term, single core is the best approach if you are solely running games. If you are looking for solid gaming while multitasking like running music, using some form of voice over IP service to communicate to your friends, or encoding/decoding, then multi-core is for you.