I used to game on a dual-core, but I upgraded to quad when I could. $75 on ebay got me a used Q6600 (core 2 quad, 65nm cpu) which I run at 3GHz+ now.
Recently I upgraded my older midrange GPU to a newer one (not the newest mind you) - a GeForce 560ti 2GB card.
Now I can play the highest-end games, by squeezing every bit of juice out of my old mobo/cpu/ram combo. I play Battlefield3, and the new Crysis 3 open beta. This is where my comment can shed light on OP's question - both of those recent high-end games pretty much max out all 4 cores of my quad-core.
BF3 usually eats up at least 85-90% of all 4 of my Q6600's cores running at 3.07GHz, and I get 20-60 fps depending on a variety of factors like number of players (networking bottlenecks), size of the map, number of explosions happening at once, etc.
Just recently I tried the Crysis 3 open beta, and ran the graphics up most of the way to the max, and it uses more CPU than Battlefield 3.
So I think if you want to play the bestest of all teh games, in terms of how many fancy pixels will dazzle your optic nerves, then you need more than 2 cores now. But if you want to play new games like Borderlands 2 etc that use older engines (UT3 etc) then a dual-core may work. Hey! Look at the box's system requirements or something maybe?
BTW, I have 6GB of DDR2 at about 900MHz, 4-4-4-12 timings, and a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot for the aforementioned GPU and CPUs. I know all of these specs are behind the times, and I do a lot of work at work with newer stuff like AMD Bulldozer-equipped servers and i-series Xeon-equipped workstations, so I have a fairly good idea of how much better the new CPU architectures are. Still I choose to postpone my personal upgrades until extra money magically appears, because it just works right now.
So many things are going in the wrong direction with the computing world nowadays, with the proliferation of Facebooking dumbasses.
Apple sold lots of iPhones and iPads, so M$ decided to jump on their gravy train (again) and turn Windows 8 into iPad-bizarro-land...
PC sales declined because of tablet/pad sales, so OEM's decide they're in the wrong business and start to kill the Real Computer market...
Now I hear rumors that AT&T is planning to kill their land-based Internet services (DSL etc) in an attempt to move to all 3G/4G service plans. This is terrible for anyone who understands what latency is and how it makes your Internet suck. 3G connections usually have about 1000ms latency vs DSL sitting pretty at 40-50ms latency. But even worse, many rural areas still have no 3G service and some can actually get DSL or similar terrestrial lines.
All these trends look like a push by big bizness to retract the last few years of progress in the PC/Internet world. It's time for some new ass-kicking innovations to start, rolling in to bust up these lame trends like The Dude's holy bowling ball towards a bunch of lame duck bowling pins of lametardness.
Robert Heinlein's ideas are once again prophetic. In the book Red Planet the adventuresome protagonist has a pet/friend Martian named Willis who is a spherical native animal that mostly moves by rolling and bouncing along. The "bouncer" creatures also extended appendages for movement or sensing things (spikes?).
Does everyone have to buy a new car equipped with all the integrated RFID/transponder gadgetry to participate in the mandated tracking system?
This type of thing, and the upcoming "black box" additions to new cars sold in the USA, are perfect examples of why you should not buy new cars frequently. Instead, repair whatever goes wrong with your current/old car and stop being so damn wasteful. Pick a good car that you like and keep it going.
I learned how to do almost all of my own car repair for this purpose. It's not nearly as hard as understanding C programming or being fluent with the Linux shell. You just have to man up and get your hands dirty. The rewards come as bountiful savings of money and inability to comply with new-vehicle tracking mandates.
If it works, use it. Like the other folks said, a lot of phones are left unsupported by their providers with no official updates. Then you have the choice of using it and not worrying about the OS, as long as it works right. That's fine for the average user who isn't likely to do a lot of USB-to-computer interfacing with it to do the upgrades or mods...
But if you really want updated software you can look into things like Cyanogenmod. Doing that got my unsupported phone all the way up to Android 2.3, whereas Motorola left it languishing with the only supported version at 2.2 or.1
2.3 has been doing well on my phone for awhile now, but if the Cyanogen guys put out a stable 4.0 release for my phone I'll definitely try it.
Motorola's spinoff co. Freescale already developed an arguably better concept based on magnetically-stored bits called MRAM.
Unfortunately they never got it to scale freely enough to make actual DIMM modules with it. What they do have is lots of types of embedded memory chips for small applications, embedded systems and whatnot. Those are on the market now.
The MRAM concept would be awesome if they ever got it onto a PC or server motherboard, though. It requires zero power to retain its data, since the individual flipping bit states are stored by tiny magnets. That means you could turn your computer on/off just like a dumb appliance like an old TV set or radio, and you'd still be right where you left off (like S3 sleep state with no power supplied). Or you could cease worrying about battery backup systems, since it could lose power and come right back.
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I used to game on a dual-core, but I upgraded to quad when I could. $75 on ebay got me a used Q6600 (core 2 quad, 65nm cpu) which I run at 3GHz+ now.
Recently I upgraded my older midrange GPU to a newer one (not the newest mind you) - a GeForce 560ti 2GB card.
Now I can play the highest-end games, by squeezing every bit of juice out of my old mobo/cpu/ram combo. I play Battlefield3, and the new Crysis 3 open beta. This is where my comment can shed light on OP's question - both of those recent high-end games pretty much max out all 4 cores of my quad-core.
BF3 usually eats up at least 85-90% of all 4 of my Q6600's cores running at 3.07GHz, and I get 20-60 fps depending on a variety of factors like number of players (networking bottlenecks), size of the map, number of explosions happening at once, etc.
Just recently I tried the Crysis 3 open beta, and ran the graphics up most of the way to the max, and it uses more CPU than Battlefield 3.
So I think if you want to play the bestest of all teh games, in terms of how many fancy pixels will dazzle your optic nerves, then you need more than 2 cores now. But if you want to play new games like Borderlands 2 etc that use older engines (UT3 etc) then a dual-core may work. Hey! Look at the box's system requirements or something maybe?
BTW, I have 6GB of DDR2 at about 900MHz, 4-4-4-12 timings, and a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot for the aforementioned GPU and CPUs. I know all of these specs are behind the times, and I do a lot of work at work with newer stuff like AMD Bulldozer-equipped servers and i-series Xeon-equipped workstations, so I have a fairly good idea of how much better the new CPU architectures are. Still I choose to postpone my personal upgrades until extra money magically appears, because it just works right now.
So many things are going in the wrong direction with the computing world nowadays, with the proliferation of Facebooking dumbasses.
Apple sold lots of iPhones and iPads, so M$ decided to jump on their gravy train (again) and turn Windows 8 into iPad-bizarro-land...
PC sales declined because of tablet/pad sales, so OEM's decide they're in the wrong business and start to kill the Real Computer market...
Now I hear rumors that AT&T is planning to kill their land-based Internet services (DSL etc) in an attempt to move to all 3G/4G service plans. This is terrible for anyone who understands what latency is and how it makes your Internet suck. 3G connections usually have about 1000ms latency vs DSL sitting pretty at 40-50ms latency. But even worse, many rural areas still have no 3G service and some can actually get DSL or similar terrestrial lines.
All these trends look like a push by big bizness to retract the last few years of progress in the PC/Internet world. It's time for some new ass-kicking innovations to start, rolling in to bust up these lame trends like The Dude's holy bowling ball towards a bunch of lame duck bowling pins of lametardness.
Robert Heinlein's ideas are once again prophetic. In the book Red Planet the adventuresome protagonist has a pet/friend Martian named Willis who is a spherical native animal that mostly moves by rolling and bouncing along. The "bouncer" creatures also extended appendages for movement or sensing things (spikes?).
Brawndo: it's got what plants crave!
Does everyone have to buy a new car equipped with all the integrated RFID/transponder gadgetry to participate in the mandated tracking system?
This type of thing, and the upcoming "black box" additions to new cars sold in the USA, are perfect examples of why you should not buy new cars frequently. Instead, repair whatever goes wrong with your current/old car and stop being so damn wasteful. Pick a good car that you like and keep it going.
I learned how to do almost all of my own car repair for this purpose. It's not nearly as hard as understanding C programming or being fluent with the Linux shell. You just have to man up and get your hands dirty. The rewards come as bountiful savings of money and inability to comply with new-vehicle tracking mandates.
I'm totally picturing this happening like it's an episode of the Simpsons in my head.
If it works, use it. Like the other folks said, a lot of phones are left unsupported by their providers with no official updates. Then you have the choice of using it and not worrying about the OS, as long as it works right. That's fine for the average user who isn't likely to do a lot of USB-to-computer interfacing with it to do the upgrades or mods... .1
But if you really want updated software you can look into things like Cyanogenmod. Doing that got my unsupported phone all the way up to Android 2.3, whereas Motorola left it languishing with the only supported version at 2.2 or
2.3 has been doing well on my phone for awhile now, but if the Cyanogen guys put out a stable 4.0 release for my phone I'll definitely try it.
Motorola's spinoff co. Freescale already developed an arguably better concept based on magnetically-stored bits called MRAM. Unfortunately they never got it to scale freely enough to make actual DIMM modules with it. What they do have is lots of types of embedded memory chips for small applications, embedded systems and whatnot. Those are on the market now.
The MRAM concept would be awesome if they ever got it onto a PC or server motherboard, though. It requires zero power to retain its data, since the individual flipping bit states are stored by tiny magnets. That means you could turn your computer on/off just like a dumb appliance like an old TV set or radio, and you'd still be right where you left off (like S3 sleep state with no power supplied). Or you could cease worrying about battery backup systems, since it could lose power and come right back.