It depends on the game you're running and the resolution/image quality settings as to whether AMD or Intel is going to be better.
Generally... StarCraft 2 (Dual-Threaded), Sins of a Solar Empire (Single threaded) really makes AMD chips look antiquated.
Fire up something like Battlefield 3 and it's no longer as clear cut as Battlefield 3 will use as many cores as you can throw at it.
If you go past that crappy 1920x1080 resolution to something like 2560x1600 or 5760x1080 and suddenly the CPU doesn't matter, you are always GPU limited.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most review websites benchmark on a clean system... That means no Applications in the system tray, virus scanners, browsers... You name it, none are running, and they can take a large chunk of performance off.
When you have more free cores, they can be dedicated to those tasks.
Personally, the only way I will go back to AMD is if they offered me an 8 core/16 threaded processor that has greater single core performance than my Core i7 3930K (6 cores, 12 threads).
But budget gamers? Go for it if it means you can get a faster GPU.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
