Quote Originally Posted by jimbo75 View Post
What exactly is the point in benchmarking at such low resolutions?
Testing prefetching on the cpu.

Most games have one heavy render thread, only BF3 and some other are using multithreaded rendering (a dx11 feature). Most games are using half or less than half of total CPU power. For most games data is rather static, maps etc are data loaded from disk and not modified during gameplay.
The main work will be calculating dots sent to the gpu. Long trains of data is calculated and sent to the gpu in chunks with commands informing the gpu how to work with those dots.

The amount of work the gpu needs to do for each frame is much less on low resolutions. It could be faster than the cpu and then it starts to wait for the cpu to process all dots.

Prefetching will increase performance a lot working with long trains of data. The cpus guess where the next data will be and fetches that while current data is being processed.

i5/i7 prefetches data to L1 and L2 cache, phenom is only using the L1 with some small prefetching functionality.

This is the reason why i5/i7 can produce much more fps on low resolutions. It's about prefetching and a fast cache.

If the game are using more threads and maps are dynamic and complex. Data isn't at all that predictable and prefething isn't as important any more.