Your CPU and modern games: A guide to those building.

[alienware]

Bad Company 2 will also use as many cores and GPU cores as you can throw at it. DICE are known for it.

BFBC2 was one of the few games I tested with Quadfire that actually worked over all of the GPU cores. So well did it work that it out performed a pair of Radeon 5770s in CFX. (Two 3870x2)

I tried explaining this in another thread but was just steam rolled.

I've read this 'blog' a few times now and I only see Skyrim being tested. One game, one set of stats. That's hardly enough to make such broad sweeping comments and brush everything else aside. The rest of it is just ranting IMO. If you're going to make such broad statements they need to be backed up with an awful lot of fact. Sadly we only have Skyrim, a game known to share many similarities with Fallout 3 and New Vegas (IE crashes on anything more than two cores).

It's a very cherry picked argument IMO and certainly not one I shall pay an awful lot of attention to.

 

[Master&Puppet]

There's actually a much more important argument which is how many cores do you need.

IPC is still king because of a general lack of multi core optimisation. Even though there are several games which do handle multi core usage it is still a relative minority of games which are played overall. Only in exceptional circumstances will an i5 fall short of what you need for gaming and spending the majority of cash on the GPU is still far more important in general.

Because of that, in general:

Intel>AMD
i5>i7

 

[alienware]

There's actually a much more important argument which is how many cores do you need.

IPC is still king because of a general lack of multi core optimisation. Even though there are several games which do handle multi core usage it is still a relative minority of games which are played overall. Only in exceptional circumstances will an i5 fall short of what you need for gaming and spending the majority of cash on the GPU is still far more important in general.

Because of that, in general:

Intel>AMD
i5>i7

I don't think any one was arguing that an I3 is an OK CPU to use for gaming. Every one seems to agree on that. It's the way this 'blog' pretty much dismisses all else and basically declares that any one suggesting a quad + core CPU is just plain wrong and we should all listen to OP.

This 'blog' wasn't borne out of nothing. It stemmed back to a post in which some one was asking what hardware to buy with what money. It was suggested that the OP of that post suggest to his friend that it was worth hanging on / saving up and getting a 3570k with a board that will overclock.

As soon as that happened an argument broke out where it was said that an I3 was equal to the I5 in gaming because, quote "Games don't use more than two cores and when they do it makes an insignificant difference".

The problem is that fact disagrees. In some cases if a game isn't using more than two cores? then it comes down to clock speed. The general philosophy around here is get hardware you can overclock. At least then if the game only supports two cores you can get a higher overall mhz out of a K series quad core which WILL boost in game FPS.

But again that was simply discounted as completely unwanted and unnecessary.

And that has been the issue people have taken. I suggested that an I3 could cope with a 7850 but anything above would be hindered by the CPU. I was told I was stupid and brushed aside.

The funny part is I have written reviews of dual core CPUs and they fall short of the equivalent quad core in gaming.

 

[Master&Puppet]

Keep beating it out of them

Now if Intel brought out a K series i3...that would be interesting. AMD would be blown out of the water and talking about threads and cores would become relevant.

 

[alienware]

Keep beating it out of them

Now if Intel brought out a K series i3...that would be interesting. AMD would be blown out of the water and talking about threads and cores would become relevant.

They won't do it and for good reason. As I said above in dual threaded apps a I3 would soar. Especially given that heat and power are less so the overall clocks would easily beat an I5.

I reviewed the Celeron G530 (2.4ghz or something dual cores hardly any cache) and it performed around 2/3 as fast as a stock I7 950. It did, however, fall on its face when more than 2 cores were being used but nowhere near as much as you'd expect.

I tested both the Celeron and I7 with the same GTX 480 and the Celeron was really holding back the GPU. Sometimes as much as 50% lower.

Which is what I base my I3/7850 being the perfect match on.

 

[Master&Puppet]

They won't do it and for good reason. As I said above in dual threaded apps a I3 would soar. Especially given that heat and power are less so the overall clocks would easily beat an I5.

I reviewed the Celeron G530 (2.4ghz or something dual cores hardly any cache) and it performed around 2/3 as fast as a stock I7 950. It did, however, fall on its face when more than 2 cores were being used but nowhere near as much as you'd expect.

I tested both the Celeron and I7 with the same GTX 480 and the Celeron was really holding back the GPU. Sometimes as much as 50% lower.

Which is what I base my I3/7850 being the perfect match on.

Yup, still totally agreeing you ya.

 

[grok23]

My personal take on it would be that we're at a tipping point where we're going to see a shift in what should be the recommendation for people looking for something "good enough" for gaming. For the last few years we've had "just get a decent quad core" as the basic mantra with hyperthreading or more cores seen as mostly just something to gouge out a higher price with.

We've seen an at first slow, but steady, rise in multi-core optimised games, with most having until recently settled around that 3-4 core sweet spot due to the influence of the current crop of consoles. In recent years we've seen more that, while they've been optimised to run well enough on 4 cores, will scale even further given the spare cores/threads and yes, though this has been a relative minority until recently, that is definitely changing in a big way. Look at EAs recent AAA titles list and the titles able to scale well now outnumber those that don't.

Add then into the mix that the next gen of consoles is only months away and with them is going to come a bunch of publishing houses moving over to writing for relatively slow by some standards, but still 8 (sorta) cored CPUs and you have a recipe that says to me we're pretty much at the point where the balance is going to change. The big launch titles for those are already well on the way and the PC ports won't be far behind. Those who have more cores in the first place or have hyperthreading available are going to be the ones who are going to get the longest/best use out of the PCs they build in the next few months. I'm already recommending to people that they shouldn't cheap out if they can stretch to the CPU with more cores/hyperthreading.

 

[alienware]

My personal take on it would be that we're at a tipping point where we're going to see a shift in what should be the recommendation for people looking for something "good enough" for gaming. For the last few years we've had "just get a decent quad core" as the basic mantra with hyperthreading or more cores seen as mostly just something to gouge out a higher price with.

We've seen an at first slow, but steady, rise in multi-core optimised games, with most having until recently settled around that 3-4 core sweet spot due to the influence of the current crop of consoles. In recent years we've seen more that, while they've been optimised to run well enough on 4 cores, will scale even further given the spare cores/threads and yes, though this has been a relative minority until recently, that is definitely changing in a big way. Look at EAs recent AAA titles list and the titles able to scale well now outnumber those that don't.

Add then into the mix that the next gen of consoles is only months away and with them is going to come a bunch of publishing houses moving over to writing for relatively slow by some standards, but still 8 (sorta) cored CPUs and you have a recipe that says to me we're pretty much at the point where the balance is going to change. The big launch titles for those are already well on the way and the PC ports won't be far behind. Those who have more cores in the first place or have hyperthreading available are going to be the ones who are going to get the longest/best use out of the PCs they build in the next few months. I'm already recommending to people that they shouldn't cheap out if they can stretch to the CPU with more cores/hyperthreading.

I totally agree tbh. The way we are going Piledriver will really start to work IMO. I read about Bulldozer when it launched and it was said that Windows 7 did not support the architecture properly but, Windows 8 would.

So that's the OS pretty much out of the way now and from what I hear AMD are making the innards for both the PS4 and the Xbox.

That means you sort of have a unified console architecture meaning it'll become a standard.

However, I still stick by my guns. The Q6600 was a legendary quad core CPU that obliterated the dual cores below it. Yes, the E8400 could run it close when clocked very heavily but it was still better to have the quad core CPU than the dual cores. Only people with a lower budget went for the dual cores (my budget was an E4500 at the time but it still did 3.4ghz).

So as I said before I'm not saying that no one should buy the I3. It's a very good CPU and is pretty capable. However, discounting all of the CPUs above it by saying that they don't do anything more is ridiculous.

The guy in the other thread (that caused this lol) was so close to having enough for a 3570k that it was madness not to get the quad core and overclock it.

If he was short by £200? then yes, by all means get a I3.

 

[Master&Puppet]

The console effect will be interesting - probably more for PC users than console users but I don't personally think it's going to be a tipping point - at least nothing revolutionary.

Both the PS4 and Xbox 720 will be using two AMD Jaguar Quadcores sewn together. 4 module/8core just like the FX series. However these Jaguar chips are optimised for notebooks and ultra low power. Each core is going to be running at just 1.6GHz. The amount of processing power is tiny per core...

I've also heard that of those 8 cores probably 2 will be earmarked for managing 'background services' whilst you game such as downloads, social media, music playing and some hardware management (such as Kinetic).

So that leaves 6x 1.6GHz cores to actually game on. Both consoles will also make us of GPGPU to some extent but that still gives us a combined processing power, CPU & GPU, of less than a desktop 7870 on it's own (although the console environment will be more streamlined than the PC environment).

Game developers will have to make use of the multi-threaded environment across the 6 CPU and the 12 or 18 GPU units (Xbox vs PS4 respectively) in order to have any kind of interesting game mechanics at all (as well as managing the graphics processing in there too). It is still very hard to optimise games for a very heavily threaded environment but presumably at least at this level it must be expected to become mainstream.

So yes, at least support for 6 cores is likely. Where console ports are concerned that will almost certainly help AMD's case on the desktop front too but in the PC gaming market alone I still think IPC will be king because it is certainly a lot easier, and in someways more productive, to code for a few cores rather than a lot. The more threads you code for, the more processing overhead you have to have which makes fewer but more powerful cores more efficient than lots of weaker ones as diminishing returns set in. In the PC only market I don't think things will change much but hopefully 4 threads will become truly standard (I think we are seeing this anyway with all the modern, decent titles).

In any case i5s will have way, way more power than necessary to handle console ports (optimising issues aside if it is even reasonable to say that).

/crystal ball