Synthetic Benchmarks: 3DMark Vantage
As usual, we'll start off with a quick synthetic benchmark to whet our appetites and give us some sort of baseline for diving into our real-world performance exploration.
Apparently, 3DMark is a fan of multiple CPU cores. It also seems to like the dual-core Pentium's architecture more than the Phenom II X2, which is surprising given the clock speed and cache disparity. Then again, synthetics are designed to (ideally) represent the future of programming in a given genre, so the fact that this gaming-oriented test emphasizes threading is more an indication of the potential of increased development effort into utilizing CPU resources in games for things like physics and artificial intelligence.
That's it for synthetics, now for some real-world games.