Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

[JumpingJack]

Is it? You can't tell only showing average fps. average fps is meaningless.

EDIT: Or did you mean that just producing as much fps as possible

You can do some research --- generally, average and min track to an extent. Though I don't disagree completely, average FPS does not show the whole story. But neither does minimum by itself.

Average is just a statistical representation of the population that it is sampling. If the CPUs were not important, than the statistical average would not be affected and the mean of the population would average to become statistically equivalent. That is not true here, the average FPS is certainly showing a response with the power of the CPU (hence the reason for the CPU scaling article). Thus, average is not meaningless overall, it does allow one to conclude which CPU supports the GPU better. Average goes higher as both min and max goes higher.

Fraps'ing any of those games shows that Intel Min is also greater than AMD min....

However, my original point is that the 4870 X2 is a darn fast card -- and drives to the CPU limited gaming domain even at high end resolutions. This is the reason review sites use the fastest possible CPU to evaluate the capabilities of a GPU ... otherwise, it hides the performance and skews the evaluation. Regardless of which CPU is faster, the interesting question to ask is... why? Why (pre-Core 2 Duo) did AMD perform better at gaming code, but with C2D the tables turn?

Jack