I just put together a new rig that consists of an Intel E6850...   This is my first dual core processor (upgrading from an AMD64 3700+ San-Diego) and I'm excited to unleash it's potential.   That got me thinking about games that may be multi-threaded, thus taking advantage of all this new horsepower I have under the hood.

I've done some Google searching and found a few threads talking about Multi-Threaded (MT) games.... but it seems it's not a very hot topic yet.  From what I can gather some of the games hitting the market now will take advantage of Dual/Quad core CPUs... but not very many.   And no where I can find a complete list of all games available with MT capabilities.

From what I can gather, the following games are MT

Crysis
Half-Life II ep2
Unreal Tournament 3
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (50/50 with this one.  Just as many deny it is MT as claims it)
Quake Wars
Bioshock
World in Conflict
Supreme Commander

I'm hoping there are many more MT games out there, but for some reason, but I can't find any extensive list other then a few lists from gaming forums.  No gaming, hardware or tweaking websites seem to be making much of a deal about MT games.  Is it because it doesn't yield significant increases in performance?  Why doesn't it seem like anyone cares?

Anyone have other games to add to the list?  Or do you have any thoughts or feelings on the subject?

Thanks!
 

Pretty sure Call of Duty 4 is as well. Don't quote me on that without research though.

for CPU taxing, don't look further than supreme commander, that game can start to cause issues for a q6600

Other multi-core games are:  
 
Call of Duty 2  
City of Villains  
F.E.A.R.  
World of Warcraft  
Age of Empires III  
Black & White 2  
Peter Jackson’s King Kong  
The Movies  
Battlefield 2  
Battlefield 2: Special Forces  
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter  
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3  
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland

Also any game based on the oh so sweet unreal engine 3 should be multi threaded enabled.Plus i actually found need for speed carbon to get higher FPS with a dual core cpu against a single core at the same clockspeed.
Graphics drivers are also dual core enabled now so native support for games should grow a lot this years and by the end of it most games will be able to use multiple cores

Are there such things as patches or hacks that enable multi-threaded optimization in a game?

Can anyone 100% confirm that Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is multi-threaded?  I've seen some people say yes, and other say yes but only with some creative .ini tweaking.

If Oblivion and F.E.A.R. are multi-threaded, performance is completely unaffected by changing CPU affinity to only one core.

In Oblivion on my old single core system I used to get low framerates in certain sections with a lot of characters on screen. Like in the cities n such. I changed my (overclocked)single core athlon system to a C2D system and kept the same video card and frames went up 80% in those situations. An easy one that is repeatable is at the beginning of the game when you are escaping and you sneak up on the king and his guards when they get attacked. My single core athlon(1800xt) got 16-18 fps right there, when I switched systems to this C2D the frames went up to 27-30 fps. all with the same video card. I tested a bunch of games before I made the switch and some games got better, some games stayed the same(gpu limited), and a couple got worse(CS:S with bots and older games).

i've never seen any benefits from tweaking with the multithreading options in the .ini file, crashes yes, no benefit's though.  i haven't mucked about with all that affinity rubbish, let either the program or windows do it's job i say.

Yes, oblivion does support Multi-threading....  although you have to make significant changes to your .ini file in order to see the benefits. I got about a 20% increase in FPS from optimizing the .ini to take advantage of memory and multi-threading advantages of my CPU. Took almost a week to get it tuned right though. word is that the next patch will make better use of dual and quad-core cpu's and will adjust the settings better automatically.

Civilization IV should also be multi-threaded because it is based on the same engine as Oblivion (gamebryo). But performance increase isn't that great 'cause the gamebryo engine is not specifically designed for the PC. The main advantage of gamebryo is for the developer because it makes games more portable to other platforms/consoles.
 
Galactic Civilization II is another multi-thread game as well.

Call of Duty 4 I'm not to sure about. I think it is, but I think that game uses memory a lot more than it would the CPU. Evidence of this is that m friend using an old P4 an an X1800XT with 3GB of DDR2 667, versus my E4500, 2GB DDR2 667 and 7900GS, he can run higher settings than me. Not to sure WHY but he can. I think it's more on memory than the CPU itself, although the CPU certainly helps.
 
As for a game that will tax your CPU the most; look no further than Supreme Commander. That game sucks up CPU usage like an alcoholic sucks up booze. It's freakin' crazy. Definitily do not try to play that game without a dual core or quad core, unless you have like 4GB of RAM. Otherwise you'll need a Dual or Quad core CPU.