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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.
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?
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]
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.
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