Slashdot Mirror
CPUs Do Affect Gaming Performance, After All
crookedvulture writes "For years, PC hardware sites have maintained that CPUs have little impact on gaming performance; all you need is a decent graphics card. That position is largely supported by FPS averages, but the FPS metric doesn't tell the whole story. Examining individual frame latencies better exposes the brief moments of stuttering that can disrupt otherwise smooth gameplay. Those methods have now been used to quantify the gaming performance of 18 CPUs spanning three generations. The results illustrate a clear advantage for Intel, whose CPUs enjoy lower frame latencies than comparable offerings from AMD. While the newer Intel processors perform better than their predecessors, the opposite tends to be true for the latest AMD chips. Turns out AMD's Phenom II X4 980, which is over a year old, offers lower frame latencies than the most recent FX processors."
Try cranking up the difficulty of an RTS on a not-so-good computer and you'll immediately notice how things slow down
Which idiot made that claim? Pretty much every hardware review site has CPU and GPU dependent games in their reviews when they review GPUs, CPUs, and OTB rigs.
...DUH!
Anyone who has put together a gaming machine has known this for years
Who thought that CPU's didn't bottleneck gaming performance? Who ever thought that? Only the smallest of tech demos only used GPU resources - every modern computer/console game I'm aware of uses, well, some regular programming language that needs a CPU to interpret instructions and is inherently limited by the standards of clock cycle and interrupt tied to those CPUs.
GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.
Otherwise, all our games would just be done with simple ray-traced logic, using pure geometry and physics, there would be no limits on the number or kind of interactions allowed in a game world, game logic would be built on unlimited tables of generated content, and we'd quickly build games of infinite recursion simulating all known aspects of the universe far beyond the shallow cut-out worlds we develop today.
But we can't properly design for that - we design for the CPUs we work with, and the other helper processors have never changed that.
Ryan Fenton
I don't recall ever reading on any PC hardware site anyone claiming that the CPU doesn't matter and all you need is a good graphics card. How on earth did anyone ever successfully submit that story?
The research into frame-rate latencies is really interesting, but the whole idea that *anyone* knowledgeable about PC gaming would have *ever* denied that the CPU was an important factor in performance is ridiculous. I am a consultant at a boutique PC builder (http://www.pugetsystems.com/) and I have always told gamers they want to get a good balance of CPU and GPU performance, and enough RAM to avoid excessive paging during gameplay. Anything outside of that is less important... but to ignore the CPU? Preposterous!
Then again, it is a Slashdot headline... I probably should expect nothing less (or more)!
William George
For years, stupid PC hardware sites have maintained that CPUs have little impact on gaming performance; all you need is a decent graphics card. That position is largely supported by FPS averages, as most GPU tests are run using the most powerful CPU to prevent the CPU from being the limiting factor, but the FPS metric doesn't tell the whole story. Examining individual frame latencies better exposes the brief moments of stuttering that can disrupt otherwise smooth gameplay. Those methods have now been used to quantify the gaming performance of 18 CPUs spanning three generations by some site that really has nothing better to do than to restate the obvious for morons. [ed: removed fanboy-baiting statements from summary]
Makes me glad I purchased a i7 - 2600k.
This should be obvious to anyone who has done any realtime/interactive graphics programing. As the frame rate gets higher the amount of time the CPU has to process the next frame gets smaller. It also becomes more diffcult to properly utilise the CPU fully unless you are willing to add a couple of frames of latency to generate frames in the future which I'd speculate is not ideal for a game type application.
My current rig that i build in 2007 and upgraded once in a while has decent gaming performance, even though i haven't put any money in it in 2 years or so... still on a Geforce 450. :)
Calm down please
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
What sites have claimed that? And doesn't the article come (to an extend) to the same conclusion that HardOCP have had for quite some time now?
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Over all GPU does impact FPS the most cheap one vs little more expensive one, but to say cpu has no impact is wrong. Overall its impact is very small but there is some.
"For years, PC hardware sites have maintained that CPUs have little impact on gaming performance; all you need is a decent graphics card." Obviously straw man is obvious. Your aunt Sally would be ashamed...
The only statement from the summary I kinda disagree with is the following. "Turns out AMD's Phenom II X4 980, which is over a year old, offers lower frame latencies than the most recent FX processors."
I only mention this because I replaced a Phenom II X4 980 with the FX 8150 last year which increased my average frame rates across the board. Oh well what do I know?
Not like I've experienced the exact opposite of their claims or anything like that.......
so... i should finally give in and buy the coprocessor for my 386!!
This video depicts the resultant frame rate drop when the heat sink is removed from both an AMD and Intel CPU. I'm not sure if this mechanism is still in place on Intel chips, although I recently swapped an Intel E6600 from a stock cooler to a tried-and-true aftermarket cooler and saw significant improvement in framerate. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06MYYB9bl70
This doesn't make sense at all. It's clear that the CPU is far more important than the GPU.
CPU speed solves stuttering and lag
Hard drive speed solves long load times
Memory amount decreases frequency of load times (memory speeds, despite what many thing, have relatively little to do with performance as even the slowest memory is far faster than any other component of the system)
GPU speed/memory amount affects quality of graphics settings and frame rate when those settings are turned on (i.e. you can check more boxes on the advanced tab without dropping to 10 fps)
As far as "bang for your buck" goes, the last thing you want to spend money on is the GPU. More memory is the cheapest way to improve performance, followed by CPU speed/cores. The GPU is the very last thing you want to invest in because the prices are so hyper inflated and the technology their pushing is usually not even used in most games. The difference in frame rates between a $200 card and a $600 card is usually less than 20% and that video card will be obsolete in 6 to 12 months. That's just not a good value.
Civ 5 for example slows to a crawl when I play any map that's bigger than "tiny". Admittedly, I'm running this on a laptop with a Core2Duo but I do have a semi-decent graphics card and have a 7200rpm drive. A good CPU is important, at least for the kind of games I like to play.
As someone who was quite keen initially I did a lot of volunteer support in the forum. Holy shit how many people complained about unplayable lag due to an old CPU. So not only is the CPU important, but it's of different importance depending on the game, and there is really no way to know for sure.
The morale of the story should just be that if you want to play the latest games, have the latest CPU and latest GPU. Anything else is a gamble.
"Strawmansummary"
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
This may be because my gaming rig doesn't connect to the internet and moreover I've turned off both the ethernet port and all services to configure it.
Then again, it probably isn't, its just Windows jerking about.
Not, really, the fault of the game.
PS who the hell thought that CPUs didn't have an effect? Hell, almost every series of GPU has had the top-of-the-range version (especially if in SLI) completely worthless with the entry level CPU you'd get at a retail store, and that you'd need a much faster CPU to find any difference.
I cannot think of a single PC hardware site that maintaned that.
Minecraft: I know it's not the best optimized game, but I'm pretty sure it still uses hardware. I have had an Nvidia GTX 275 forever though many CPUs. When playing Minecraft with an older Quad Core Intel CPU (can't remember the model number) I would get around 30FPS at medium settings, after upgrading to an I7 with the same video card, now my Minecraft FPS is around 90FPS with the same settings.
So I can attest empirically that "CPU matters" is in fact the case. Also games like ARMA2, Supreme Commander 1 and I'm guessing any game that has a whole lot of entities doing magic stuff in memory at the same time, the CPU matters a great deal. When upgrading my CPU and keeping the same video card the aforementioned games really improved quite a lot.
This could of course (in my uneducated opinion) be because the programmers of the game didn't load the code that could have gone into the GPU onto the GPU but rather "rolled their own methods" on the CPU and harmed performance unnecessarily. Either because they did so ignorantly or were forced to do so. I can see that happening in Minecraft and ARMA2 which has pretty amateurish (unoptimized) coding, but I can't see that being the explanation for Supreme Commander 1, the programmers on Supreme Commander 1 were indeed supreme coders and I bask in their glory.
...told you this! I been saying this for years. I didn't buy an AMD FX 8-core and 16BG of RAM for kicks!
I will say though, that for a while, RAM was a major player.
"That's right...I said it."
Hm. First there is:
"...The FX-4170 supplants a lineup of chips known for their strong value, the Athlon II X4 series. Our legacy representative from that series actually bears the Phenom name, but under the covers, the Phenom II X4 850 employs the same silicon with slightly higher clocks."
and then:
"Only the FX-4170 outperforms the CPU it replaces, the Phenom II X4 850, whose lack of L3 cache and modest 3.3GHz clock frequency aren't doing it any favors."
How can I trust them if they are unaware of basic stuff any chip enthusiast should know? (The Phenom is the Athlon with level 3 cache. The Athlon has none.) They could have also touched on what the 2 AMD specific hotfixes were for.
I'm not shocked at the results, but I am skeptical of the degree of disparity.
I find anymore that when it's time for a new CPU, it's time for a whole motherboard. Either the socket has entirely changed, or there are new chipsets with more features, higher bandwith interfaces, etc. When your system is able to shuttle data around faster performance as whole increases.
Just for example - If you get a newer SSD it can really benefit from 6.0gbps SATA ports. The only practical way to do this nowadays is to get a newer motherboard. (Add-in SATA cards are either complete crap, or cost 2x what an entire motherboard does. There is no mid-grade add-on SATA market at all.)
I've got a core2 quad based machine at work. It's great! The Core2Quad chips can really do their job for their age.. But the rest of the system is really starting to show it's age. It won't be long before the new ivy bridge "pentium" (Low end 2 core) or i3 (mid-grade 2 core) systems will run circles around it. (Except for tasks that need lots of cores, like running VMs)
(from TFA)
After consulting with our readers, we've decided to enable Windows' "Balanced" power profile for the bulk of our desktop processor tests, which means power-saving features like SpeedStep and Cool'n'Quiet are operating. (In the past, we only enabled these features for power consumption testing.) Our spot checks demonstrated to us that, typically, there's no performance penalty for enabling these features on today's CPUs. If there is a real-world penalty to enabling these features, well, we think that's worthy of inclusion in our measurements, since the vast majority of desktop processors these days will spend their lives with these features enabled.
That's wrong for the Phenom II. I find a 30 % difference when enabling frequency scaling on a 965 for a single-threaded workload. It seems that each core is clocked independently and there is some delay when increasing the clock speed. Maybe the Windows frequency scaler is better, but for this CPU there seems to be a real difference. The problem is that they are talking about bursty load, and trying to quantify delays, so they should really try without freq. scaling on the Phenom II.
A whole freakin bunch of us are all FPSed out after the last decade. Let's start focusing on some other genres for a change...
I have been saying this for years, but have never had any data to back it up. For me it has always been a "seat of the pants" sort of metric. Over the last decade I have tried AMD CPUs on a number of occasions, and always found them to be lacking in comparison to Intel CPUs of the same generation. My latest gaming machine is running an i7-960 (got it cheap from NewEgg) and it works great with all of the games I play.
Yea if I'm trying to render 120fps then yes it's a bottleneck. Chances are you only have a 60Hz monitor so VSync will lock you at 60fps. Most of the tests ran above 60fps with some exceptions on the older CPUs. So you can spend your money on an expensive Intel i7 to render frames you cannot see, or you can buy a cheaper processor and spend the money on a beefy GPU or fix the real bottle neck is the HDD and switching to a SSD is a better improvement.
Tell this to someone who plays civilization...or SoF.
as this article points out it's not the number of frames per second that really matters:
it's the longest gap between subsequent frames which the eye picks up on.
you could cram 200 frames into the last 10th of a second, but if the other 0.9 seconds only has 1 frame, it'll feel like 1Hz.
i typically chart another metric next to traditional FPS which is 1 / (max inter-frame period in one second).
For me, it comes down to price VS performance, which is actually something I'm trying to figure out as I'm looking for a new rig.
At some point, too low performance becomes a regular lag-fest. However, if I can get decent load-times and run at 780P'ish resolution at good detail levels, I'm fairly happy. 1080P would be nice at medium+ detail for use when connected to a bigger TV, but I don't really see the point one an 22-24" LCD. I don't need 200fps, but somewhere consistent between 40-60+ would be nice for gaming.
Intel definitely tends to deliver more in the performance arena, but even the cheaper CPU's are often double the price of the AMD counterparts, and the motherboards tend to be a bit more costly as well.
Beyond gaming, compile-performance is nice. I do a bit of graphics work so while being able to play something like BF3 or Crysis at 1080P@60FPS or better is nice, not having to wait a long time for my app to compile or my mesh to render is equally as important, as is being able to run my desktop OS + possibly a VM or two.
Lastly of course is drivers. I haven't yet tried one of AMD's FM-series chips, but I'd hope they're Linux-friendly in terms of the graphics driver, etc. One thing I'd say for AMD is that their ATI acquisition seems to have improved their chips' graphical capabilities a notch, but also made a difference in the quality of drivers for the graphics line.
At the end of the day, is double the price or more going to double my performance, or is the more reasonably-price offering going to give me enough performance to suit my needs.
Are you joking? Maybe it's just me because I actually work in IT and was educated to do so but what retard would actually believe anyone who said CPU doesn't affect gamign performance? What retard would say that as if it wouldn't come back to haunt them?
And, no Cathector - an experienced PC gamer can tell the difference between an actual frame rate. Not 1 fps difference, but in 10s easily.
In a game, look at the sky. If your framerate shoots up, the video card was your bottleneck. If it doesn't, your CPU is.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
My observations:
- Biased article, intentional or not it's biased
- When AMD does do when they are still bashed down by the author
I won't be reading that site again, what crap.
FPS's:
Depends on where the AI etc is. If mostly you're getting data on 32 players then you need a low-latency network connection and most of the rest is going to be rendering of fancy explosions, fog, scenery, etc. Hence things tend to tie up nicely with games like BF3 etc
Now get a bigger RTS.
Lots of on-map units. Pathfinding. AI. etc. Latency is important but CPU maybe moreso than graphics
Owing to persistence of vision, once you have faster frame rates than about 30fps or so, the eye is just going to blend them together, and you won't perceive all the individual pictures separately. The only reason you might perceive a difference between higher frame rates is because of the fact that there can be different information being presented to your eyes in individual frames which will still contribute to the overall image that you see, and more frames means more data being contributed to the image, but your eyes are still going to blur them all together.
So, theoretically, with all the suitable blurring applied to a single frame, the eyes would probably not be able to distinguish any difference between 30fps and a much higher rate.
Of course, implementing such blur which might effectively simulate a faster frame rate can often be just as, if not more computationally expensive than simply rendering all of frames at a higher speed anyways, except for very specific (and simple) cases... so I really don't know how practical said theory is.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I will take a mediocre cpu with a kick ass GPU than the other way around. Sure I have an under clocked phenom II at just 2.6ghz but with my ATI 7870 I plan to get it will blow away an icore7 extreme with the HD 4000 graphics by several hundred percent!
GPU is where it is at with games. Just like with Windows an SSD makes a bigger difference than a faster CPU booting up.;
http://saveie6.com/
Ok so when I get beautiful Starcraft 2 rendering from my GTX 570m and then there's a big lag (frame rate goes from 40-50 to 10 fps) because the screen is full of units firing at each other, I need to blame the CPU? I assumed it was Windows 7's fault -- they couldn't even code a multi-core OS properly. (I have a Qosmio X770-11C)
the i5 2500k is the best gaming cpu .
GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.
Your theory is basically valid, but the practical reality and the empirical evidence of the last, I dunno, 20 years or so, is that the graphics processing takes a significant amount of computing power. There's a reason that virtually every computer and every game console has a dedicated GPU. For that matter, a dedicated sound processing chip. It's all offloaded and the APIs have improved to the point that it doesn't seem like much work, but those specialized chips are burning an awful lot of power.
For a wide variety of games, the game logic just isn't that complicated, or rather, it doesn't require as much computing horsepower as the rendering. Sports games and FPS are the most obvious but I'm sure there's others. The most CPU intensive game I can think of is Civilization 4. I'm sure it's been surpassed, and yeah the AI still sucks, but late in games you can really tell that the CPU is chugging away.
The truth, of course, is that something will ALWAYS be a bottleneck. The argument seems to be: is it the CPU or GPU?
hey, so i was thinking of a new gaming build, i want is a dual xeon server type board, like this:
Intel S2600GZ4 Server Motherboard Dual LGA 2011 DDR3 1600
i want to run everything in ram, it supports 768GB of ram and 6 pci-exp 2.0(hmm is 3.0 an issue?)
plenty of video card slots for the best ati/nvidia cards (i guess, not sure if that 3.0 is going to be an issue)
the idea would be i'd push the game system button, go fix coffee, shower, and have everything loaded into ram.
the only time data gets sent from ram would be when i shut down, i have clean powerbackup of sufficient length to archive anything to hard drive, spin or ssd
so for the games out there, would this be the best? i game in windows 7, dont plan on 8 for awhile unless its got some cool feature like some new game requires it ( like diablo with 95/98 i forget, pretty sure diablo didnt run on windows for work groups)
this is a serious question,especially about the loading everything in to ram, ram drive, i have no idea what games really require, but last steam download was a few gigs plus or something, it took forever. anyway, i hope i get some good feedback.
if i'm going to spend my time building a proper gaming box, i want expandability, like with this example i could start with 1 cpu and sufficient ram, and one or two video cards,
as far as i know, the top end xeon's are as good as the best i7s?
oh i play Red Orchestra 2, mostly, but i was thinking of playing Crysus, or mass effect 3, diablo 3,,, i mostly like multi player coop type games, Unreal was the best for that i've found, its been how long since a great coop game like Unreal?
Best Regards,
grimjack of Red Orchestra neo psusdo fame.
using terribly performing and buggy console ports for PC gaming benchmarks.
AMD clearly oopsed on their shared FPU design.
Still, did anyone look into what compiler was used on those tests?
There is a claim out there that Intel compilers puts special checks into code that turn off all the special goodies that has come since 386 if the CPU does not ID it self as a genuine Intel...
Likely not a big deal, but still something to keep in mind...
No, not really.
I assume you are referring to the fact that when you look at the sky the game engine culls (skips rendering) most of the objects in the scene, therefore the GPU has less to do and if you are not CPU bound the frame rate shoots up. However when you are not looking at the sky BOTH the CPU and GPU load increases and your test does not reveal which has now become the bottleneck.
Your test only confirms the obvious: that it takes less resources (CPU and GPU) to render the sky than a full scene.
That doesn't mean some don't have a tendency to overvalue them. A good graphics card is the most important factor when it comes to gaming. Period.
My young cousin's Alienware M11x proved that much to me.
This also shows what many of us have been saying which is Bulldozer is AMD's Netburst.
Yes but not for the reason you think. Netburst introduced two things:
- An extremely deep pipeline, which was a stupid idea and ultimately netburst's demise and core's reboot from the ashes of pentium3. That's the thing most people are referring to when comparing both chips.
- HyperThreading. the ability to run 2 threads on the same pipeline (in order to keep the extremely long pipeline full). That's what's similar to buldozer's problems.
When HT was introduced, its impact on running windows software was catastrophic. That is simply due to the fact that Windows was optimized for SMP (Symmetric Multi Processors) where all CPU are more or less equal. Hyperthreadinng is far from symetric: it introduces 2 virtual processor which must share resource with the real one. You have to properly schedule threads so that no real cpu is idle while a virtual core is strugling. And you have to intelligently schedule threads to minimize cache misses. Windows simply wasn't designed for such architecture and definitely sucked at correctly juggling with the threads and the virtual processors. Proper Windows support came much later (and nowadays enabling hyperthreading under windows doesn't come as much a performance hit).
The "half core" of bulldozer are in the same situation. It's also a weird architecture (although less is shared between half-cores). It requires correctly assigning thread to processors, etc. Again current Windows ( 7 ) sucks at this, you'll have to wait for Windows 8 to see an OS properly optimized with this situation. Until then, the half-core design will come with a huge performance cost.
But that's only in Microsoft world.
On Linux the situation is different. Beside the Linux kernel being much more efficient for thread and process scheduling, Linux has another advantage: opensource code coupled with shorter release cycle. And thus the latest kernels available already support the special core model of bulldozer.
The end result is that bulldozers run much more efficiently under Linux than under Windows (as can be assert from the Linux benchmarks on Phoronix).
And they have decent performance per dollar.
Lets just hope that recent hire of the former Apple chip designer to AMD can right the ship, because otherwise when I can't score X4s and X6s anymore i'll have no choice but to go Intel.
What you'll benefit the most is waiting for a version of windows which does support the bulldozer model.
Although the bulldozer have some short-comings, which are in the process of being ironed out.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
you misunderstand.
No one is claiming that the CPU is not stressed by a game. The point is that current games are constrained by GPU long before they are limited by CPU. The CPU might be able to crank out 150fps on a certain game (150fps of game logic, AI, physics, etc.) but if the GPU only can render 50fps of graphics for the same game then increasing CPU performance is useless.
I had the right amount or ram, and hdd, and a decent nvidia, but a Celeron. The chargen was suryp slow. Had to buy a new computer to fix.
from none other than timothy
pc hardware sites have not mmaintained cpus have little impact on gaming
they've been saying that you're better off putting money into a gpu compared to cpu
if you've paired your GTX690 with an atom cpu, guess where the bottleneck is?
or if you've paired a i3960 with gt210, guess where the bottleneck is?
it's only idiots that then translate such data into "cpus have little impact on gaming"
when Crysis wouldn't load on my 80286 machine.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
*there* is the parallel.
There is parallel in the way people perceive them.
There is a big difference under the hood in practice.
I mean people see both and say "Bulldozer is the new Netburst" just as "Windows 8 is the Windoes Vista is the new WindowsME".
But the reasons behind are fundamentally different.
Netburst sucked and was hopeless. Bulldozer is suboptimal but there's room for improvement.
Intel went out chasing high numbers, what they got, was a chip that clocked moderately highly, but performed like ass anyway, and sucked power.
They got it, because they choose a design path which has many drawbacks, they sacrificed a lot just for the sake of higher GHz, Netburst doesn't bring much interesting thing to the table. I could maybe somewhat work a little bit today using the latest shrinking technologie, advanced cooling, and finally hit the 10GHz where the architecture should be competitive. While still sucking a lot of power.
But back in the Pentium IV days, there were no hope that anything could actually efficiently use it.
It "performed like ass" almost by design. Because all the things they neglected end up biting them in the long run, and become hard limits.
The only way to do something better was scrap the whole thing, move to something simpler, and stop favouring GHz at all cost, preferring it above anything else including power consumption.
Which they did. The Core family was done by improving over the older Pentium IIIs.
And they did it again in a way with the Atom family, which is not completely unlike the even simpler and older Pentium, giving an even lower power end result (though its difficult to compete with ARM in this range...)
The only solution to get Intel out of their solution was a garbage bin.
The only useful stuff which came out of the Netburst architecture was HyperThreading. Which was useless back in the Pentium IV era for lack of proper OS support. But worked better when it was reintroduced later in the Core era, just because Windows had some time to mature.
AMD went out chasing core count, what they got, was a chip that can't hold its own against chips with half as many "cores", and sucks power.
On the other hand bulldozers are limited by things which are improvable in the near future.
Some might be design flaws on the silicon, but these are stuff which can be fixed. And that means in the near future, not counting on some advanced technology 10 years from now to dramatically shrink the process. Part of the "sucks power" problem is fixable in hardware.
(And part of it is fixable by litteral "building architecture". AMD is a little bit late using older processes, simply for lacking manufacturing plants with the latest technology like intel).
But most problem aren't even hardware, but software.
- The OS and Kernel scheduler need to support its peculiar concept of half cores. There's a dramatic difference *already today* in using Bulldozer between Windows and Linux. Because current generation of kernel inside Windows 7 predates Bulldozer's release. Whereas Linux is not only fucking much more efficient, but support for half core was added long ago.
- The software needs to be written to take advantage of Bulldozer, specially using more cores. But *that is* the current general tendency anyway:toward multiprocessing, and multithreading. so that will happen naturally over time. Just look at the Google's Chrome: Each tab is (for security and sandboxing reasons) a separate (isolated) process. It's the most visible and known example, but other software follow the same trend. Being of Unix heritage, Linux uses multiprocessing much more heavily and thus has much more use cases where Bulldozer is useful (server tasks is one example).
(Also in the opensource world Bulldozer's other advantages are usually only a compiler switch- or a tool library upgrade- away. Software can take advantage of that rather quickly)
So yeah, a
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The article measures the single player performance of Battlefield 3 and concludes that the CPU doesn't matter much. But in the larger multiplayer maps I find my CPU (Phenom 2 triple core at 3.2 GHz) to be the bottleneck. At least the FPS drops below 60 with the GPU utilization dropping too.
CPU quality is also related to memory and bus speed which probably have as much an influence on performance as the cpu
love is just extroverted narcissism
CPU doesnt affect much at a high resolution with current games (>1080p).
for every game you can show that sees meaningful gains from a CPU beefier than a phenom (again, at >1080p), there are at least 5 other games where >phenom-CPUs add little to nothing at all.
thats bound to change with the upcoming next generation, but it is the current state of things.
A computer is as good as it's weakest point.
If you have a super graphics card but a processor that can't keep up, your game is going to suck.
If you have a hard drive that can't read and write game files fast enough, it's going to suck.
If you're hitting your memory ceiling, it's going to suck.
This is something even the biggest of idiots like myself know, why the hell is this on a "news for nerds" site?
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
What I meant is that in both cases the company threw out good design practices chasing a single metric, higher clocks in the case of Intel, higher core count per TDP in the case of AMD, and both paid/are paying for it. In both cases you get chips that run hotter, suck more power, and give less IPC.
It's just that in my opinion, AMD didn't fuck as bad as Intel. AMD has design and support problem, but has a viable design which can be saved and even work nicely in the long term. Intel dig themselves in a hole, and there was nothing that could be done to save Netburst back then.
Specially Intel did threw good design practice: they didn't let anything stand in the way to the GHz race.
- They used an ultradeep pipeline, just because that helps making smaller shorter steps and thus higher clock counts - but ultra-deep pipeline are problematic and are prone to catastrophic stalls. (Hence they were forced to develop HyperThreading just to compensate for this. Which brought its own set of problem as mentioned before). Just to get a bigger GHz they moved to something which can only work worse.
- They completely ignored anything else: power consumption, thermal output. (To their defense, nobody used to give a fuck about it then neither. That era was similar regarding those metric as gaz guzzling SUVs where to mileage. Transmeta had a hard time persuading everybody that a ultra-low-power/low-thermal output CPU has actual use cases, even if that meant slightly less powerful than Intel chips). The problem is for the netburst architecture to shine, you have to push past 10GHz (according to Intel's initial plan). But if your chip needs to be powered by a mini nuclear reactor, and output enough heat to not only cook your diner but even bake the china on which to serve said diner, that won't be easy to achieve without the whole thing melting or even achieving fusion - if you pardon my understatement. For Netburst to succeed, Intel needed to jump from 130nm to 14nm over a few months and make vapo-chill cooling mainstream. That didn't happen. So Netburst was useless from the begin.
- They completely ignored even the tendency in software evolution. Concept behind Netburst would be good to run a single (repetitive, non branching) task or just a few threads as fast as possible. It might have made some sense given the designs of some games back then. But it didn't make any sense given the evolution of the whole ecosystem: multitasking got progressively more popular (and with the jump from the DOS-based monstruosity WinME to the NT-based WinXP: even the home user version of microsoft's OS got some decent multitasking support). Even if the task run is purely sequential and single threaded, there are progressively more such tasks running concurrently. (Cue-in jokes when the first consumer-level quad-core appeared: you need 1 core for the slow Microsoft OS, 1 core all the mandatory antivrus and similar protection, 1 core for all the crapware/spyware/malware that has infected the machine anyway, and one last 4th core to finally get things done. It's a joke, but it actually shows the global tendency)
Meanwhile, there's nothing wrong in Bulldozers. There aren't any fundamental argument against half-cores. They can be seen as a type of evolution beyond hyperthreading. They make sense given the long term tendency in software development (more and more multiprocessing and multithreading). They still have a clever fall back mode (shut one pipeline, fuse the half cores, boost the clock speed, and have the module work as a glorified super-overclocked really-superscalar (2x the resources) single core, instead of 2 half-cores). They are much more efficient when in two half-core mode compared to HT (HT: is a shared everything solution: The two threads have to share a single pipeline. And use the same set of integer-/float-/etc.- units. The theoretical maximal IPS count is the same with or without HT. You just can keep the CPU more busy in case of stalls. It just make better use of the ressources. Meanwhi
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