No they didn't.
Perhaps you should read what is there rather than reading in your suspicions.
Tri-cores scored less than a dualie on 5/13 tests. They only had an ok gain on 2 tests on one console port.
2 core is where you get your gaming performance, so GHz+IPC on them matters. Two fast cores will beat four slower ones. If you have a quad that will turbo up to a dualie's frequency, great. But if you're sacrificing individual core speed for more cores, you're gimping your gaming.
Let me explain my argument in more detail.
🙂
Looks like it confirms my suspicion that you need at least a triple-core in newer games.
Maybe I should have been more explicit, but I did not intend to include games released before 2009 in the set of "newer" games. I also agree that there is something weird going on with odd core counts, especially on ATI.
By performance below, I mean minimum FPS, because that's the only thing that matters IMHO.
Now, let's look at GHZ:
Fastest Athlon II X2: 3.2GHz
Fastest Athlon II X3: 3.1GHz
Fastest Athlon II X4: 3.0GHz
Now the reviewer used the same clock speed for each part so we need to scale the numbers a bit. If we scale the performance of the triple and quad cores down by 5% to account for the clock speed difference, we see that you get the same or better performance than the dual core (except in Dirt 2 ATI). And this is with engines, as Sp12 noted, that aren't well known for their scalability!
It is my suspicion
🙂D) that this is because that even though the
game itself may only utilize a dual-core, there are many other processes that are running on the machine, thus the poor minimums on the dual core. This is even a sort of best-case scenario for dual-cores, as the machine in question is a stripped down benchmarking rig. Many people will have many other processes running while they're playing games.
EDIT: Now that I've actually read the article's conclusion (I admit, I usually only look at the test setup and graphs), I see that the writer essentially put forth the same argument as I just did. Man, I could've really saved myself some writing.
