Elite Bastards takes a look at gaming performance for dual-core users.

We're now a little over six months down the line from the launch of AMD's dual-core Athlon 64 X2 systems, and recent weeks have seen the first tangible signs of game developers seriously putting some time and effort into working multiple processor support into their titles, no doubt in part due to the development of multi-core CPUs in the next-generation consoles (aka Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3), and quite possibly to a larger extent due to Intel's marketing dollar persuading the release of patches to add performance to dual-core (and indeed HyperThreading) parts.

This change in thinking leaves us with two patches for big-name titles released in recent weeks which focus on optimising performance for multi-processor systems. Today, we'll be looking at both of these titles, Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, to see just how much extra performance these patches have managed to add to users of a dual-core architecture.

Dual-core gaming on test - Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2