Back in the Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament days games were very CPU (Central Processing Unit) bound and in order for the graphics card to perform you needed a turbo charged processor. However, the trend these days is for games to be more GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) intensive rather than CPU intensive. This is very evident in games such as F.E.A.R for example, which rely primarily on GPU power rather than CPU power. However, RTS (Real-Time Strategy) and simulation type games still appear to be quite CPU dependent so getting the right balance between CPU and GPU power is still very important.

In this article we have taken eighteen CPU’s currently available from both AMD and Intel. These CPU’s have then been compared in four games, being Company of Heroes (RTS), Far Cry (FPS), F.E.A.R (FPS) and X3: Reunion (Simulation). While we would have liked to include more games, testing eighteen processors with three graphics cards in four games does take quite a lot of time. That said, we do plan to keep adding games to the list over time. The same goes for the CPU’s, as we also plan to add new AMD and Intel processors as they are released.

The cheapest processor used in this article was the Sempron 3600+ at just $43 US, which was followed by the Celeron 440 which costs $68 US. At the other end of the scale we have the AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ at $170 US and the Core 2 Duo E6700 at $317 US. So while you can expect to pay four times more for the 6000+ when compared to the 3600+, you pay just over four and a half times more for the E6700 when compared to the 440. It will be interesting to see how the performance of the Intel processors scales when compared to AMD’s.