[NeonAges]

    No, this is not a bash on the Core 2 Duo.  Though I like to fancy myself an AMD guy, I do find the Core 2 Duos pretty fucking cool.  This post, instead, is a rant about how most of today's mainstream gamers, including those "professional" gamers who are paid to play, still fail to understand the basic workings of hardware components.  This can be considered a branch of my analysis of the geek subculture that was posted a little more than a year ago.

    The subject that brings up this rant comes from a demo video showing the Core 2 Duo benchmarking stuff.  Basically just Intel flexing some nuts.  The first minute or so of the video shows the Core 2 Duo kicking some Pentium 4 ass in an Office 2007 benchmark, which "utilizes a lot of floating point values that the Core 2 Duo is awesome at"(Paraphrased from man in the video).  Okay, neat stuff.

    Then the man brings out two chicks that belong to a female professional gaming clan or something or the other and they swap some witty banter about professional gaming and all that.  They reveal that the game to be showcased here will be Dark Messiahs of Might and Magic (Really looking forward to this game) they then go off about how it's a nice looking game and it's next gen game running on next gen hardware since it's a game based on the Half Life 2 engine.  Well, okay I'll let that slide- It's based on the Source Engine which the GAME Half Life 2 is based on, but common mistake and that's not what this rant's about either(Not to mention the fact that Source Engine is current-gen software.  They then talk about physics and how the Core 2 Duo allows you some blazing fast physics effects, okay that's fair enough but I don't really have to mention that the Havok physics engine is designed to be handled very well by today's processor.  Hell, even my 3500+ is making quick work of Havok physics.

    Then she has to go and drop the bomb on me.  "The Core 2 Duo allows better AI!"  Okay, okay... wait a minute.  After wasting my time with useless banter about big monsters and horrible puns, that's the huge bomb that you drop on us?  So ladies and gentlemen, according to this chick, or probably the Intel writers if they really had anyone scripting this demo, having a better processor will make your software coded AI smarter.  Now, unless they coded in functions that -added- more AI routines, a more faster more efficient processor will not do jack shit to your code!  We live in an age where we play games that, on a typical PC, the bottleneck is more than likely the graphics card or, to a lesser extent, your RAM.  Quite frankly, your processor speed usually has fuck all to do with how well your game runs.  About a year or two ago, your FSB speed might've mattered, but that's still not raw CPU speed.

    If they would've brought out a physics demo with bitch-tons of crap flying everywhere and dynamically morphed in real-time, and all the while it's racing against a team of asian MIT grad students trying to crack a metric-ass-ton-bit encryption of God's porn, then yes I'd say that's a good demo of your processor's power.  Having a little girl come out and tell me that buying their processor will make code be smarter...  That just won't cut it buddy.

I donno, maybe at the end of the video they all flashed a smile and threw some thumbs-ups around and ran around yelling "JKJKJKJK!!!!!LOL", I just couldn't bear to watch the rest of that video if they were going to keep pretending to know what they were talking about.


But yea, they could probably kick my ass in HL2DM.  Oh, BTW here's the video that I keep ragging on.

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