Core 2 Duo Scaling in Gaming - PAGE 6 Kevin Spiess - Thursday, January 24th, 2008
Unreal Tournament 3 is much less demanding of your video card than Crysis -- but how about on your CPU? The official requirements recommend a 2.4 GHz or faster dual core system, and for the minimum requirements, a single core at 2 GHz or faster is enough to cut the mustard.
With that low of a CPU requirement, I didn't expect as much CPU scaling as the charts indicated:
Similar to Crysis, the E6700's performance plateaus at 2.2 GHz, delivering smaller gains at speeds above this point. At the 1280x1024 resolution, performance scales with CPU from 1.6 GHz all the to 2.8 GHz - but at the 1600x1200 resolution, CPU scaling is mitigated, and performance is more directly tied to the performance of the GPU.
If you are wondering what happen to the results at the 3 GHz mark, unfortunately Unreal did not like that overclock very much, and was very unstable.