Performance in Games

Contemporary games do not use multi-threading that is why dual-core processors cannot boast significant improvements in applications of this type. Athlon 64 X2 3800+ performs at about the same fps rate as a single-core Athlon 64 3200+:

However, due to the efficiency of K8 architecture in games, Athlon 64 X2 3800+ doesn’t yield that greatly to the single-core Pentium 4 processor in games. Moreover, we can once again point out that the shift to 64-bit mode hardly affects the processor performance in gaming applications.

Even though game developers do not please us with too many advantages of multi-core processor architectures, 64-bit extensions start little by little finding their way into this type of tasks. Not so long ago a new patch came out for the popular Far Cry game, so that now you can play this game from Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition in 64-bit mode. Of course, we couldn’t leave out this fact and tested the processors performance not only in the standard 32-bit version of the game, but also in the 64-bit version.

As we see, the fps rate is somewhat higher in the 64-bit Far Cry version. So, 64-bit operating system and 64-bit version of the game will guarantee you about 3-5% performance increase.