The balance will obviously vary from scene to scene in the games, just as we've seen with Half Life 2, but the limitations will be there. Despite what we have seen in recent years, it does look like the next generation of games that employ more sophisticated artificial intelligence and physics will be quite CPU and platform dependent, just as they are GPU limited. Half Life 2 is actually the first game where we've seen this degree of dependency, which does make for some interesting predictions for the CPU/platform requirements of the next generation of games. Not only is the game very CPU intensive, but because of its dependency on a fast CPU, Half Life 2 also appears to be quite dependent on high available memory bandwidth and low latency memory at the same time.

The extensive physics engine in Half Life 2, especially as seen in Half Life 2 Deathmatch, is very CPU dependent and thus we see a real world performance advantage to the Athlon 64 over Intel's Pentium 4. With performance advantages of around 15% at the same price point, the Athlon 64 does offer a noticeable increase in performance over the Pentium 4 in Half Life 2. At this point, Intel's Pentium 4 architecture does take a backseat to AMD's Athlon 64 when it comes to gaming. After our Doom 3 - CPU Battlegrounds article, we already knew what to expect from CPU performance under Half Life 2.

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