Benchmark Results: DiRT 3 And Metro 2033
A moderately-powerful single-GPU Radeon HD 6950 is more than enough for most of our DiRT 3 tests, so this benchmark gives us the opportunity to look for CPU effects on gaming performance.
A slight performance improvement is limited to this game’s lowest test setting, which isn't really an attractive option for serious gamers anyway.
To the same end, we hold back on congratulating Intel for maintaining its advantage at that same resolution, since 1280x720 isn't a particularly noteworthy resolution in the desktop environments where you'd find an FX or Core i5 processor.
More demanding graphics settings make us wish we’d installed two or three of AMD's Radeon HD 6950s, if only to reduce GPU bottlenecks and micro-stutter simultaneously.
Knowing that this is a GPU-bottlenecked game, we can look to our lowest test settings to see that Microsoft's Windows 7 patches do boost performance slightly.