STALKER Call of Prypiat uses one of my 4 cores at full 100% all the time, that's the usage I found monitoring the CPU usage with Rivatuner, so Windows 7 not all the time spreads the thread across all the cores. Bioshock uses two cores with an average usage of 27% to 54% while the other two remaining never exceeds 24% and can go as low as 7%, it would means that it's optimized for Dual Core only.
I find odd that in every thread you keep hailing the i7, you should buy one. The i7 architecture isn't any wider than the Core 2 Quad architecture, so the IPC isn't that much different, both C2Q and C2D shares the same IPC, it isn't any different at all.
The main advantage of the i7 is their server approach tweaks that helped to boost performance like an integrated memory controller, more SSE instructions, cache tweaks, Turbo Boost for single threading and hyper threading which helps to maximize the front end utilization which went underutilized a great deal of time with the Core 2 architecture, plus it might be not a big deal but the i7 is a true quad core, the C2Q communication between the first set of two cores with the second set of two cores was abysmally slow. The Core i7 has a higher latency cache compared to the C2Q, but the C2Q besides of the underutilized front end issue, it was very limited by the Front Side Bus and its non native quad core design.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3382&p=3
"Conroe was the first Intel processor to introduce this 4-issue front end. The processor could decode, rename and retire up to four micro-ops at the same time. Conroe’s width actually went under utilized a great deal of the time, something that Nehalem did address, but fundamentally there was no reason to go wider. "
GTA4 will never be the best representation of future games, the game has crappy graphics that can't even tax enough a HD 3870 in terms of raw power, it is so CPU bound, plus has a lots of uncompressed textures that will simply fill a 2GB card easily, making it a VRAM/Texture limited game, it is simply a crappy game with no optimizations. If the game was properly done, it would run great on a Dual Core and a 9600GT with no problems, so much hardware for so little in return, Crysis did it much better as it offered much better graphics, and running it on a Quad Core won't give you lots of benefits.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/778-10/giant-roundup-131-intel-and-amd-processors.html
Here the benchmarks shows that Nehalem is barely faster than the C2Q and Phenom II in terms of gaming performance, in everything else, the biggest difference is only 50%, which shows that talking out of context, Nehalem is simply a rehashed C2Q with a True Quad design, IMC, minor tweaks for better threading performance, server oriented performance tweaks and a redesigned cache. At the execution engine level, they're not too different. But there's no reason to dump the design since it is a very good one which dates from the P6 design and its first incarnation, the Pentium M.
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