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Many people equate Windows PCs with Intel Pentium processors (and soon will likely be doing the same with Macs), but we've seen dual-core CPU AMD systems power ahead of dual-core Intel-based PCs on more than one occasion.

To answer the question once and for all, we circled up a bunch of cars in an abandoned parking garage and set ourselves to a no-holds-barred dual-core desktop CPU fistfight. AMD submitted its five dual-core CPUs, and Intel matched with its lineup of four. We built two test beds as nearly identical as we could for the two platforms and ran each chip through a battery of tests. We then ran those results through our price-vs.-performance calculator to find out not only which is the best overall dual-core CPU in terms of raw performance but also which one offers the most bang for your buck.

Many of us are familiar with standard gaming benchmarks. Whether you're testing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, or Far Cry, most gaming benchmarks are made from the "Quake Timedemo" mold. They run through a sequence of recorded gameplay or simply walk the player through parts of the game, counting frames and time to give you an average frame rate.

This is good for benchmarking graphics cards because it provides repeatable and predictable results. Every time you run the benchmark, the same thing is displayed on screen. Eliminating variables introduced by normal gameplay is a very useful part of performance evaluation. Ideally, you want to eliminate every variable except the one you're trying to test (a graphics card or CPU, for instance), right?

The problem with these gaming benchmarks is that they don't test the true gaming experience during gameplay. When playing back a standard "timedemo" style recorded benchmark, many of the game's systems either don't operate, or function in a controlled, pre-determined fashion. AI, physics, and much of the core game logic are often disabled when playing back recorded benchmark demos. These are CPU-intensive tasks, and removing them from the picture can be useful in graphics benchmarking, but what if you want to see which CPUs perform best in real-world gaming scenarios?

In this feature, we'll be using a popular program called Fraps to measure performance during real gameplay in six different games across multiple genres. We'll look at how the games run faster and slower over time, and get into a bit of a discussion about "how many frames-per-second is enough." The point is to figure out whether Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 processors make for a better gaming platform, and to this end, we'll compare two CPUs that are easy on the checkbook.

Early last week, we received an email from Igor Levicki, commenting about Jason Cross's feature article, Real Gaming Challenge: Intel vs. AMD. Levicki wasn't disputing Jason's conclusion�that AMD beats Intel by wide margins in gaming tests. But he apparently decided to dig a little deeper. Here's what he did, in his own words:

It intrigued me why Intel CPUs have inferior performance in some games and in others they are on par with AMD.

Therefore, I have reverse-engineered Battlefield 2 game executable and come to the following conclusions:

1. It was compiled using Visual Studio 2003 C++ compiler.
2. It was compiled in blended mode almost without any optimizations.

We headed over to Microsoft's MSDN web site and obtained this little tidbit about blended mode:

"When no /Gx option is specified, the compiler defaults to /GB, "blended" optimization mode. In both the 2002 and 2003 releases of Visual C++ .NET, /GB is equivalent to /G6, which is said to optimize code for the Intel Pentium Pro, Pentium II, and Pentium III."

But Microsoft recommends that code writers use /G7 when designing code for Pentium 4's and AMD Athlon systems. Again, here's more from the MSDN web site on the topic:

"The performance improvement achieved by compiling an application with /G7 varies, but when comparing to code generated by Visual C++ .NET 2002, it's not unusual to see 5-10 percent reduction in execution time for typical programs, and even 10-15 percent for programs that contain a lot of floating-point code. The range of improvement can vary greatly, and in some cases users will see over 20 percent improvement when compiling with /G7 and running on the latest generation processors. Using /G7 does not mean that the compiler will produce code that only runs on the Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon processors. Code compiled with /G7 will continue to run on older generations of these processors, although there might be some minor performance penalty. In addition, we've observed some cases where compiling with /G7 produces code that runs slower on the AMD Athlon."