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Dual Cores Are Getting More Popular Gamer communities are slowly switching to dual core parts	By Ionut Ciocirlie, Hardware Editor 19th of January 2007, 11:34 GMT Adjust text size:


Dual cores have been around for quite some time but it seems that the sector has only recently been seen as appealing for the gamers. Of course when you run your SO and all you do is work in a 2D environment, a dual core comes in handy especially if you use apps capable of putting all that power to good use. But if you're a gamer, all you want is to have more fps and generally you can improve your gaming experience by using a higher clocked GPU with a bigger cache. So you might think that dual cores don't matter. According to an automatic survey conducted by Valve Software, 50.36% of Steam users have PCs based on INTEL CPUs, while AMD CPUs only run in 49.64% of all 847 thousand of gamers who use the Steam service. As I've pointed out earlier, about 87.39% of the total number of users still have systems with a single core. But if you compare the data with earlier surveys, you will realize that the number of dual core users has gone up and now about 12.56% (106,000 Steam users) have dual core PCs. The numbers include those who have dual CPU machines as well as the ones who possess dual-cores on one chip. Finally, about 0.05% of users (416 people) already have a quad-core system at home. And just in case you're interested, 2 gamers have an 8-core system at home probably being based on a pair of quad core Xeons. So the dual cores are finally kicking in, at about 2 years after the first releases. The problem with multi core systems still remains the poor support in games. At the moment, few games benefit from the dual-core processing power. As for quad-cores, they are still obsolete because - aside from the rendering and encoding apps - no game can use more than two of the four cores. Valve hopes to change that in the near future, but for the moment, if you're a gamer, dual core is the king of games.

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