Quote Originally Posted by Manicdan View Post
i think the problem is the balance between tech that works great now, and tech that will last a long time.

most people are still happy with their 4400+X2 they bought 5 years ago. i just upgraded my 4850 to a 5850 and saw no increase in WoW, i guess somehow that game is cpu limited even though my PII 940 never has one core above 70%. some things really just dont like scale today, but if everyone only offered quads and above, maybe software would accelerate faster. it would be nice to know the single threaded jump, since many consumer programs probably dont care to be re-written for quads and above. but i think if i got a 8 core BD, i should be set for hopefully 4 years before i would need to upgrade again.
If you take your time and test some games you'll see how CPU limited they are where it matters the most, min FPS. Crysis (yes, Crysis) works exactly the same in almost all the first and second level with or without AA with my 5850. Play with CPU frequency and you'll see some surprising numbers. Not to mention any "old" game (FEAR is old here) is only single threaded, and the situation is exactly the same as Crysis. Walk into a crowd in Assassin's Creed and play with GPU and CPU power, more interesting numbers will arise. Getting constant 120FPS with VSync is almost impossible in the majority of games because of the CPU, and this is with the fastest Intel processor, overclocked.