Originally Posted by Rbstr
Path finding for an AI is WAY more taxing than someone, or a dozen, running around.
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Exactly. This is why SC2 is usually a CPU-bottlenecked game.
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Player input, that is movement, looking ect. is easy because it's on human time scales and a CPU is just way beyond that.
The northwood-Celeron with a 690 would be able to run at high nearly as well as it would run on low - it would run like crap in all settings.
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That's true, except the issue here with a true MMO is that your and the hundreds of others' input has to be processed pretty pretty quickly for everyone to see the same stuff on the screen. And this has to go through the communication protocol that is usually managed by your OS (i.e. your CPU) since it needs to go out the ethernet cable and to the server. Server-side processing can help here, but it can't do 100% of the load and you need some client-side calculations to cope with the packet nature of the internet. Perhaps WoW wasn't the best choice for an example on my part here, but it's a pretty universal truth that the slowest experiences you have in WoW is in the capitals, where everyone likes to hang out (and not out in the dungeons or raids).
The problem with MMOs (esp. true MMOs like PS1/2) here isn't that stuff has to be processed quickly, it's that a LOT of stuff has to be processed simultaneously. That's why PS1 was always gasping for extra resources back in 2003, and that's why PS2 is going to be such a demanding title.
Perhaps that's where properly threading a game like PS2 will enable it to run well, but as McHurtz is quick to point out, not everything can be threaded.
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Something in the last 3 gens of i5 or better probably will probably be above the bar and the graphics card will be the main differentiation in performance.
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Agreed. My point here is that sadly, AMD's current flagship is only really competetive compared to the 1st gen i5. And that's a shame, 'cos I can't help but feel somewhat ripped off as a consumer.