apoppin
Lifer
The gamebyro engine used in Oblivion, FO3, etc is notoriously cpu limited and single threaded. Once you throw some mods into play it is very cpu dependent. I noticed no difference between 6950 and 6950 crossfire in New Vegas but a pretty nice difference between an i5 760 and i5 2500k. Borderlands without AA(aa causes a massive performace hit in this game) is also very cpu limited. X-bit uses it in reviews if you want some benchmarks.
Even in certain graphics intensive games like Crysis the cpu can make a difference with minimum framerates. I noticed this more in sli, I'm just without a card for the time being.
I've found this to be a great article on microstutter. I haven't had much time to play with sli but it is something that I saw with 6950 crossfire.
It's an ancient article - and it you really have to stress a system to see microstutter.
i bench with Borderlands .. it is not very CPU-limited at all!
- it is UNREAL 3 ENGINE - and with this engine there is No AA that you can force (except for MLAA and soon FXAA). Unreal 3 engine is CPU-dependent - meaning it scales with more cores than 2 - however, a video card upgrade will (almost) always make a much bigger performance increase than a CPU upgrade will.
And Fallout 3 is on GameBryo engine's last legs - it's time for the trashcan for that engine; it was already old when Oblivion came out .. Thankfully, Skyrim is on a new engine. Say inefficient, perhaps - but not demanding. And it is multi-threaded. It's just that some people experience the "stutter" and others don't.
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