They AREN'T current games. Those tests were old and used outdated versions of the games. How could they possibly be relevant? I don't choose my CPU company by looking at Athlon 64/FX versus P4/PD benchmarks today, so why should I look at performance benchmarks and accept them as still true when they are outdated too? That doesn't make any sense at all. People often try to prove me wrong with outdated benchmark,s but it never works because the benchmarks are simply outdated. I will never understand why so many people like to use outdated benchmarks. They aren't relevant because they don't show how what they were testing performs in current situations, even with the same tests, but simply more up to date.
I guess we all know that an i3 is better than an i5 that has a slightly lower clock frequency because a slightly faster per core CPU is better than a higher end, but slightly slower per core quad core CPU. We all know that Phenom II x6s are worse than Phenom II x4s for gaming these days.
None of that is true because most modern games are more well-threaded than they games used to be, even many older games that are continually updated (especially Blizzard games). Tom's own up-to-date tests show this.
I'm not trying to be rude, but maybe I failed in trying not to be, but this is ridiculous. Outdated benchmarks are outdated. They aren't relevant in this context and they probably never will be relevant in this context again.
Heck, even in older tests, Tom's proved that an i3 can be a bottle-neck in many games and not just because of core count either. Performance per core is important too and it always has been for gaming. It always will be so long as CPU technology is organized into cores and similar structures. It's not always the end-all be-all, but it is always a factor and that is unavoidable, just as clock frequency has always been a factor in performance of something that has one and will be so long as we use synchronous electronics.
I don't need to read up on any of this. These are unavoidable aspects of computing with current methods of technology. They haven't changed ever since computers we first made synchronous electronic CPUs and they won't change so long as we use them, perhaps even longer.
You can argue nonsense all you want, but like I said, this is ridiculous and I'm done arguing over it. If you want to, then go ahead and keep saying that nearly one year old benchmarks of games that have had substantial patches since back then are still relevant. This is like saying that benchmarks of AMD's Radeon 7000 cards with the old December driver are still relevant today for gauging graphics card performance despite that too obviously being not true in the least, granted several people have tried to tell me otherwise.