Task Manager however showed us that Windows Vista is actually being more efficient with all four cores than Windows XP. Single-core was still unplayable, dual-core was much more playable, and quad-core delivered the best experience with noticeable improvements. However, the same pattern of core scaling emerged that we experienced under Windows Vista.
It is quite clear as can be seen from our highest playable settings evaluation and our apples-to-apples tests that Windows XP is simply faster. It was at the level where we could now run the game with higher in-game settings on dual and quad-core. What we discovered immediately was that performance was much faster under Windows XP. This operating system supposedly has better support for multi-core processors but scored much worse in the benchmarks. However, they were disappointed with the performance of Windows Vista. HardOCP mentions scaling the cores of their Core 2 Duo in Supreme Commander yielded positive results.
For their test they used Supreme Commander in Windows XP and Vista, this is one of the first games that features out-of-the-box multi-core processor support.Īs expected, this game takes good advantage of multiple cores. Brent from HardOCP had some quality time with Intel's Core 2 Quad processors to find out how multi-core processors improve gaming.