Will old pc games benefit from intel core 2 duo technology?

[flash110]

Hi!, I just have a few a bit old games like age of empires or warcraft 2, I played them in my slow amd Duron 1300 at 1.2Ghz computer and remember altough i could play them they ran pretty slow. I´m considering an upgrade to a intel Core 2 duo like E4500 or higher which have a speed of over 2 Ghz, My question is if old games like these or even new games will benefit from both cores running at 2Ghz or they will only run as if it was a single core at 2Ghz, as far as I know core 2 helps a lot when performing multitasks like compressing movies or editing videos but will a single heavy application like games also benefit from both cores? Thanks in advance

[Zertz]

Those games won't benefit from having a second core available, but the processor's architecture is much more efficient so the games would run flawlessly. New games tend to have better support for muticore processors, but right now quad cores are overkill for gaming.

Basically, even if you disabled a core and clocked it down to 1.2Ghz, it would still be much faster than your Duron.

[slugbug]

I installed an old game the other day(Kingpin) and didn't notice any improvements compared to when I last ran it with Win 98 on an old P3. My rig uses an Opteron 165.

[T-Shirt]

Older games (actually any single threaded app.) don't directly benifit from multiple cores........BUT if your other processes/apps' are multicore capable (stuff like AV, firewalls, disk and network operations) they can be offloaded to the second core, leaving the first core avalable for the game to run at it's best possible speed/quality with out the slowdowns/pauses/etc. you may have had before.
We are at a transition point between having to have software written specifically to use multiple cores, vs O/S's caple of running a few steps ahead on every possible thread but only returning the ones that are needed.
Think of a simple maze game, you come to an intersection, and before you decide which way to go, the game (or O/S) has run the instructions if you turn left for a few steps on one core, the same for a right turn on another, straight ahead on another. as soon as you turn left it discards the other possibilities and begins running instructions for all the next possible scenarios. from your viewpoint the action is seamless.
In the near future (a few years) your computer CPU will have dozens to (maybe) 100's of relatively simple cores automatically doing this with all the software you use.
what you see in today's supercomputers/grid array's will be on your desktop.

[ij70]

Am I the only one who thinks that running WarCraft 2 on anything with 1.2 GHz is more then enough?

[ibleet]

Am I the only one who thinks that running WarCraft 2 on anything with 1.2 GHz is more then enough?

Minimum requirement is P3 800mhz, recommended is P4 1.5Ghz so it should run just dandy with 1.2Ghz.

[ij70]

Am I the only one who thinks that running WarCraft 2 on anything with 1.2 GHz is more then enough?

Minimum requirement is P3 800mhz, recommended is P4 1.5Ghz so it should run just dandy with 1.2Ghz.

Mine says:
DOS 5, Win. 3.1, Win 95
33 MHz 486 or better