Gaming with the GeForce GTX 980
Testing at 1080p with the GTX 980 in BioShock Infinite should allow for an average of just over 110fps when not limited by the CPU. Here we see that the Pentium G3220 and Celeron G1820 drop off the pace, averaging around 100fps, which was also achieved by the Core i7-870 and i5-760.
The Core 2 range really struggled with the Core 2 Quad Q9650 averaging just 78fps and only 72fps for the Core 2 Duo E8600.
Metro Redux can utilize more than four threads and is a very CPU-intensive game, as you can see by the fact that the Core i7-4790K is 6fps faster than the i5-4690K. The Sandy Bridge processors performed well and the i5-2500K was only slightly slower than the 4690K.
Compared to the Core i3-4350, the Haswell Pentium and Celeron processors delivered extremely poor performance. However, both were still faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9650, which is a little suprising.
Hitman Absolution is another CPU-intensive game, though not to the same degree as Metro Redux. This time we find that most of the processors are able to average between 63 and 68fps at 1080p. Where the performance really starts to drop off is when we use the Pentium G3220, which averaged just 47fps, though this was enough to beat the Q9650's 42fps.
Tomb Raider's results are interesting because this game isn't CPU-intensive at all and almost all processors were able to deliver 95 to 98fps, including the Q9650.
Crysis 3 is a good example of the performance trends you can expect to find in most games because it's primarily GPU-dependant, though it still requires a decent processor.
The Celeron G1820 performed just fine and we see that the latest Haswell series processors stand out as the better performers here, naturally. Only the Core 2 range struggled with weak results.