No,BF3 MP is easily one of the most cpu demanding games out there.While i completely agree that running an i3 will give you a good gameplay experience(that's exactly what i'm getting) switching to an i5 will give you much better performance,especially at lower settings and in multi-gpu configurations.Look at this MP benchmark:
http://www.sweclockers.com/image/diagram/2507?k=ce91bc9f6c6266a1792efe936c92f2d4 and
http://www.sweclockers.com/image/diagram/2506?k=142b45af179c625ccd8f53fea7385155.You can even see an i7 975 beating the 2500k thanks to its multithreading capabilities.That doesn't happen in any other game.Ever.
In the first link, it's obviously mostly GPU limited. However, removing the GPU limitation doesn't really change the situation. It exposes which CPUs perform better, but in this case, they're all (except the x2, obviously) giving
enough performance for a smooth playable experience.
That's the thing about games, there is effectively a limit at which more CPU buys NOTHING. Once you reach that point, a faster CPU is of no use but lightening your wallet.
My own personal experience is that I don't really notice a difference until FPS minimums get to around 35-40 FPS, and it doesn't become really annoying until down closer to 30 FPS. With those CPUs showing 50+ FPS minimums, there's quite a bit of margin to be eaten by the "multiplayer tax" to get to the point where a CPU is actually limiting the user experience.
What you can take from those graphs is that it's fairly easy to get a CPU that's fast enough to play the game perfectly. You can get it from a few fast cores or lots of slow cores. This demonstrates a game that is flexible to end user hardware and the game is realistically not very CPU intensive, or there'd be more hardware struggling to get 30 and 40 FPS minimums. Obviously, the game prefers lots of fast cores, but that has it's own downside ($$$).
Remember, the original post that set this all off was about how BF3 "needs" a quad, I still think there is little to no evidence of that. Only the Phenom x2 is showing poor performance in the benchmarks shown, and that is not in the same class as a SB 2C/4T.
I don't think the 2100 is perfect for BF3, and I don't think anyone ever said it performed as well as a 2500k. My position was that an OCable SB dual + HT would be enough to play the game perfectly (from an end user experience standpoint) though... that would be significantly faster than a 2100 due to the ~50% higher clocks the OC would open up. Think about the total performance compared to a stock 2500k... BF3 benefits from HT, that's a significant bump in performance per core over the 2500k. OCed clocks are ~40% or so higher than stock 2500k clocks. An OCable dual would end up at close to 90% of the power of a stock 2500k, which is enough to be perfect in most games. When you have many games that will load 2 cores lighter than another 2 cores (BF3 doesn't appear to be one of those games), you could potentially have one that actually performed faster than a stock 2500k in a game that favors quads. That would be enough for the vast majority of gamers, even pretty serious gamers.
Someone with a 2600k should disable 2 cores and bump their OC up a bit, as disabling cores will most likely allow a couple hundred additional MHz on any given OC, just to check out just where we'd be with an OCable i3. I'm willing to bet that the experience in BF3 would be just as good as with all 4 cores enabled (meaning minimum FPS would be high enough that you would only be able to tell the difference with benchmarks).
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