With games any way, with the soon to be release of the dual core Athlons you'd expect these new chips to blow any previous chips away, in multi-tasking, video-editing, rendering etc. yes, but still not gaming. "The company warns that Athlon FX 55 will end up approximately 15 to 20 percent faster than dual-core CPUs on PC games. Its message is clear: if you want to play games and get the best scores you have to use FX not dual-core X2 chips." more
Not especially surprising really, it just takes too much work for games to be multithreaded properly. Its ok for the person who wants to encode video while doing other tasks, but for games, its better to have awesome single threaded performance rather than just good multitasking.
Well, it also depends on the game. Not to mention the benchmarks in question were probably done in Windows, which does not multithread well at all. Games which are written to take advantage of multithreading, like UT2004, should see a healthy performance boost with a dual-core setup. This will be even more pronounced in Linux, Unix or BSD.
