Quote Originally Posted by Lightman View Post
Simple explanation:

GTA IV can spawn 3 threads which can utilize CPU fairly well. For that reason Single, Dual and Triple-Core will show CPU utilization close to 100%!
Quad-Core will be utilized in 75% assuming no other thread is using it and GTA IV will extract everything from remaining 3 cores.
Six-Core CPU will hit max. 50% utilization.
8 cores/threads can be utilized 37% by GTA IV!
Now Core i7 is not hitting close to theoretical 37% and the reason for that can be either HT lowering utilization or GPU saturation (in other words CPU too fast for a given GPU).

Is that clear enough?
Are you sure those settings are maxing the GPU? I don't think those settings are very gpu-bound. In any case, your last statement takes nothing from what I said; if the i7's HT is the culprit, meaning the cpu is taking a negative hit, the results are still better than the PHII And if the gpu is maxed, then are you saying it takes only 22% of the processing power of a Ci7 at 3.6ghz to max the a 4870x2 with GTA IV? Or are you leaning towards the unknown?