The editor of Tweaktown just sent me an interesting link to a test that they performed so seek out what happens to gaming performance when using less cores on a new Intel Core i7 CPU. While I can't vouch for their methodology, I found their findings interesting: The difference between 1-core and 4-cores (with hyperthreading*) is often small or non-existent. When there is a small jump, it happens between switching from 1-core to 2-core. Using 3 and 4 cores doesn't usually result a perceived performance jump in the games they tested.
The games: World in Conflict, Crysis, FarCry 2, Left4Dead.
Head to Teaktown to see the details, but the idea is that unlike video-encoding and other tasks, today's games aren't really good at taking advantage of a multi-core setup. That's not just because developers are lazy, it's mainly because a lot of tasks are not inherently prone to be dispatched over many cores. That is why Intel has been internally pushing "per-core" performance improvements, and I think that this is what makes Core i7 much more interesting than previous generations. Multi-core alone won't work unless we have a tectonic shift in software design.
Related: Core i7 Review, Intel Research Day
*Hyperthreading: a technique that allows near 2-core performance, while using a single core.
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