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Can Legacy Dual-Core CPUs Drive Modern Graphics Cards?
MojoKid writes "A few weeks back, we discussed whether a new GPU like the GeForce GTX 660 could breathe new life into an older quad-core gaming system built in mid 2008. The answer concluded was definitely yes — but many readers asked to reconsider the question, this time using a lower-end dual-core Core 2 Duo. The Core 2 Duo CPU chip used was a first-generation C2D part based on Intel's 65nm Conroe core. It's clocked at 3GHz with 4MB of L2 cache and has a 1333MHz FSB. The CPU was paired with 3GB of DDR2-1066 memory. The long and short of it is, you can upgrade the graphics card on a six year-old dual core machine and expect to see a noticeable improvement in game performance — significant gains in fact, up to 50 percent or more."
Yes of course they can drive these cards, will they do it at the same performance as a modern dual or quad core CPU, no.
Next question.
At least not reliably.
The issue is PCI express 1.0 and 1.1 performance on 2.0 cards and later. Geforces have been known to crash using an earlier slot technology or on lower end systems. Maybe that has changed since the 9600GTX, but I switched to ATI for this reason. Even many Radeons are only tested with later hardware and instability and other bottlenecks happen as many games as Windows swaps video ram to the system ram even when there is plenty of ram available.
http://saveie6.com/
Mostly new games are 90% console conversions so 5 year old cpu with modern GPU will do fine since textures are low res anyway.
Fun things to do in a crap economy
why 3gb ram and not 4gb or 8gb++? at least have dual channel ram with 2 2gb sticks.
To save you a few clicks, here's the key conclusion (and much better said than the summary from /.) :
Intel Core 2 Q6600 chips aren't available new these days, but Ebay has a ton of them, regularly priced between $50-$70. (...) Is a new CPU worth the price? I'd say yes --especially if you've currently got a dual-core CPU in the 2.2 - 2.6GHz range. The combined cost of a used Q6600 and a GeForce GTX 660 should still come in below $300 while delivering far better performance than any bottom-end desktop you might assemble for that price tag.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
I recently upgraded my CPU from a E4400 to a FX-6100 and added an SSD. I would say the SSD was probably the only reasonable upgrade, in terms of gaming. The FPS certainly better, but it was already above 50-60 FPS in Team Fortress 2. What's the point in making a difference if your eyes aren't going to register it?
The SSD was an excellent upgrade. I used to launch TF2 and go heat up some dinner while waiting for it to load. Now it launches and loads levels in under 30 seconds. That's much, MUCH better than before.
On the other hand, I work a lot with Xen on my Linux partition. Upgrading from a CPU that didn't have any virtualization extensions to one that did made my life so much easier. Being able to launch any kind of OS with very good performance (for a VM) is such a nice upgrade from a VM that could only launch Linux guests.
I used to game on a dual-core, but I upgraded to quad when I could. $75 on ebay got me a used Q6600 (core 2 quad, 65nm cpu) which I run at 3GHz+ now.
Recently I upgraded my older midrange GPU to a newer one (not the newest mind you) - a GeForce 560ti 2GB card.
Now I can play the highest-end games, by squeezing every bit of juice out of my old mobo/cpu/ram combo. I play Battlefield3, and the new Crysis 3 open beta. This is where my comment can shed light on OP's question - both of those recent high-end games pretty much max out all 4 cores of my quad-core.
BF3 usually eats up at least 85-90% of all 4 of my Q6600's cores running at 3.07GHz, and I get 20-60 fps depending on a variety of factors like number of players (networking bottlenecks), size of the map, number of explosions happening at once, etc.
Just recently I tried the Crysis 3 open beta, and ran the graphics up most of the way to the max, and it uses more CPU than Battlefield 3.
So I think if you want to play the bestest of all teh games, in terms of how many fancy pixels will dazzle your optic nerves, then you need more than 2 cores now. But if you want to play new games like Borderlands 2 etc that use older engines (UT3 etc) then a dual-core may work. Hey! Look at the box's system requirements or something maybe?
BTW, I have 6GB of DDR2 at about 900MHz, 4-4-4-12 timings, and a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot for the aforementioned GPU and CPUs. I know all of these specs are behind the times, and I do a lot of work at work with newer stuff like AMD Bulldozer-equipped servers and i-series Xeon-equipped workstations, so I have a fairly good idea of how much better the new CPU architectures are. Still I choose to postpone my personal upgrades until extra money magically appears, because it just works right now.
It's no surprise that you can hook a fast GPU to a slow CPU and get good results, look at Raspberry Pi, who could imagine doing HDMI video with a single core 700 MHz processor?
Seriously? "up to 50% or more"? Can the submitter get any more vague?
That's because most commercial PC games are coded for an XBox 360 level of CPU, most of what the better GPU does is push the same image to more pixels. If a game could use more CPU for anything aside from eye candy, it could end up affecting the gameplay itself in unpredictable ways; like when I tried playing Wing Commander on a modern CPU... Undock and WOOOOOOOSH SMASH! into an asteroid instantly; or 'El Fish', which on a 386 took 10-15 minutes to generate a fish... tried it on a modern CPU, when it starts it divides some number by the number of minutes to generate a fish... less than 1 minute? divide by zero crash.
Turn based games like Civ 4 fortunately scale very well, I no longer have time to get a snack waiting for the computer controlled civs until the endgame.
Although ideally more of the Graphics pipeline can be offload to the GPU hardware instead of the driver software leaving a smidgen more CPU for the game code itself.
We have an older Socket AM2 board and a 64x2 4200+ CPU. I paired it with an ATI RADEON HD 4670 1GB video card and 2x2GB RAM and it still does almost everything I throw at it. However, I've noticed my newer games are struggling in spots. This mainboard will handle the 6000+ CPU that has double the L2 cache and faster clock. My question is, "Is it worth the $60+ to upgrade or should I just be looking for a newer machine?". Please note, I don't have a lot of cash to throw around and that eventually I want to get something newer as I have an interest in playing MechWarrior Online. This machine will probably get HTPC status via Linux/XBMC. This is my quandry.
Why can't we go back to using jumpers to configure slot adapter cards? Why? I say!
Even since PII and PIII, we'd been speccing an above-average graphics card on our dev machines in a software shop to get better performance per buck - and not just on games.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
I have an AMD Phenom 9600, which is 4 cores at 2.3GHz. It still gets by decent enough for anything except games that have come out in the last 2 years. Many of newer games max out my CPU and leave me with an unplayable experience. I have a friend with the same GTS 450 as me, who gets by fine with an mid-tier Intel machine purchased last year.
Seems quite silly to have such an old CPU (dual core 3GHz) with a (back then) top of the line GPU but it's working great! Note that I'm also using 6GB of ram at 800Mhz dual channel (1+1 + 2+2 GB).
I am able to play LOTS (if not all?) games with high / very high graphic detail since then. There are a few options that are tightly coupled with the CPU sometimes and I avoid these, but the rest works great at 1920*1200 (24" screen), even with new games.
My next upgrade will probably be a CPU upgrade, probably with the new Intel Haswell this time when it's released, but I'm not expecting a big boost in games, mostly a faster system overall (dual core is still a bit limited when you have so many programs launched in the background).
Can an AMD Athlon 64 X2 drive a Radeon HD 7770?
I've got a Matrox Parhelia APVe, which has no open-source drivers, and the latest are for Ubuntu 8. Been thinking of getting a Radeon, will I be able to play any good games with it???
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Imagine trying to pair a graphics card from 2000 with a cpu from 1995. Not only would the 1995 CPU be wed to a motherboard with no AGP slot, but the real world benchmark of a 133 MHz Pentium Vs a 1 GHz Pentium III was HUGE. The clock speed alone was nearly 8x greater, not to mention the greatly improved instruction sets...and FSB improvements. I honestly thought that by now, there would have been some sort of "killer app" that would have really put the pressure back on the desktop, to where the average person would really *need* that Core i7 over the i3, but to the average user, it doesn't make a bit of difference. Even to me, my 4 year old Q9400 paired with DDR2 800 is still more than adequate driving 3 1920x1200 monitors and massive multitasking. It even handles the occasional gaming weekend quite well, as well as ripping HD video content. Not to mention today's video cards still physically fit in my PCI slots!
I bought a HD 4770 and I had a dual core athlon at the time, according to benchmarks.. I want to say I was losing about 5% performance due to the CPU bottlenecking.
Speaking from experience, I can attest to the conclusions of the article.
The machine I am using as I write this is similar to the machine descibed, though I am running 3.25GB of DDR3 (the most this motherboard can utilize for some odd reason). This computer was one of the 1st-generation "Built for Vista" machines--it's a Gateway my daughter bought intending on putting XP on it. Turns out much of the hardware had no drivers for XP, and...well, to be honest, it sucked so bad she bought ANOTHER computer (Best Buy wouldn't give her a refund).
I ended up with it eventually. I up-graded the RAM as best I could (had sticks laying around), installed Windows 7, and dropped a HD7550 in it--While it isn't a screamer, I actually use it as my gaming machine. The biggest visually noticeable performance gains were, by far, from installing Windows 7. The drivers that Windows found worked great. The video card was the next increase in performance, and it was astounding.
But here is the important thing I discovered with this arrangement--the gains are entirely dependent on the software being used. Some games use massive amounts of CPU when they could be handing off some of that load to the video card, and those games don't run so well. Other games are better in this regard and take advantage of the video card and those games I can usually run at maximum settings.
I play an emulator of Star Wars Galaxies and most times I have two instances of the game running concurrently as well as a browser on a secondary monitor. I usually have Ventrilo running at the same time. Sure, only one instance of the game is actually being rendered, but the CPU load is doubled...and this machine handles it wonderfully, with game settings maxed out. I've also run Skyrim easily on this machine, mods galore.
I am quite pleased with the arrangement
I'd like to see Metro 2033 in those tests. That's the most demanding FPS I'm aware of, beating out even Crysis.
Presently, I run triple 28" monitors with an overclocked GTX 680 in NVidia Surround (5760x1200) backed by an Intel i5-2500K stock and 8 GB DDR3-1333 RAM.
Even with this configuration, I struggle to get acceptable framerates in Metro 2033. I had to turn the settings way down to achieve this, and it's still the minimum of what I would consider playable. I suspect my biggest limiter in this regard is the fact that when I got my GTX 680 they were new and hard to get ahold of, thus I went with the 2 GB model. I've personally witnessed my system hit 100% GPU memory utilization while playing WoW in 5760x1200 on Ultra. I suspect the 4 GB models would not have this problem.
Sure, single monitor gaming you can skimp on components. But once you move past that, forget it; you need prime hardware or you're going to see the difference plainly.
That's how I read the title at first. It's a shit title.
How can anyone be suprised by this - let alone /. readers/submitters?
... can I get that GTX 660 for an AGP slot?
I play games just fine on this rig... 4GB of DDR2 and an SSD on Windows 7...
Why wouldn't you be able to? The issue with running a graphics card is actually a combination of the chipset on the motherboard and available power delivery. The CPU actually has very little to do with interfacting to the graphics card, the point of DMA ( Direct Memory Access ) and other transport systems is to seperate the CPU from the rest of the hardware. The motherboard acts like a crossing guard steering all the "traffic", the PSU delievers all the "food" and the CPU's only job is to think about what it's passed.
only the server versions of Windows allow PAE for memory address space expansion
And Microsoft put this policy into place because manufacturers of workstation hardware and peripherals couldn't clean up their drivers to make them compatible with PAE.
Hate to sound like a fanboy, but I'm really just thrifty. :) :(
Save yourself alot of money and just get a AMD Vision system
A10 Desktops are pretty cheap(under $650,) come with a monitor and other accessories, and they are pretty much future proof in terms of games.
I know the A6 laptops are under $600, those will play any game available now, but get an A8 or A10 if you wanna crank all the visuals up to max.
For reference, I'm enjoying games like Borderlands 2 on my A2...and while the new DMC is lag city, I really can't complain about a $300 laptop. Especially when a $300 Intel laptop gets me laggy web browsing, laggy office, slow boot up...Sorry to bash Intel, I really do love them, they just aren't in my price range
Uh.. yeah. Every single person here knows this. Gaming has not been exceeding our CPUs for several generations of hardware now. It's all about pushing the GPUs.
0 to infinity? :D That's makes it hard on us summary-readers! Now we must go read the article.
My 6 year old core 2 duo computer just got upgraded into a new case and given a Radeon 7870, and it can run new games on medium with max framerate and high between 30-50 average. The CPU and motherboard outlived the plastic power button and other functions on my case and is still running.
Another huge improvement to my computer was adding a solid state drive. I upgraded the graphics card first and noticed a big improvement, but then adding the SSD felt like a big improvement as well. Chivalry: Medieval Warefare runs really smoothly even on mostly high settings now.
I recommend upgrading your video card if you have a core 2 duo for sure.
In 2010, I put a then-modern PCIE video card in my P4 3GHz HT box. Suffice to say, Starcraft II ran on Ultimate settings just fine. I think the big difference between my beater and a much newer machine was load times, but once the core game was up and running, it kept up really really well. I think it probably helped that the video card had a fair bit of memory. Perhaps if I wanted to revive that machine further, I could also throw in SSDs, which would probably only offer limited benefit, but would certainly reduce any potential for disk io in the actual drives from being a choke-point. lol.
It's commercial break time on slashdot!
After selling my main gaming PC I kept a spare ATI 5970 (dual GPU card), I then was in need to satisfy my League of Legends addiction and had little budget for the job. Bought the cheapest ASrock mobo and the cheapest dual core AMD Sempron X2 190 (around 20 Euros for that).
Well It can run Diablo 3 and LoL at a decent framerate! And as a bonus I've tried to run my Skyrim modded world and it works good!
Yay 100 Euros and I can still play the latest hits with a fairly decent experience.
Lesson learned, next time sell the Video card as well!
I make the statement that CPUs fell behind GPUs a long time ago based on the sort of optimizations that make the largest impact in Direct3D and OpenGL. If you try to render each triangle of a mesh individually the performance is abysmal compared to storing the mesh data into vertex and index buffers/arrays. If you profile it on both CPU and GPU side you'll notice the GPU is rendering the triangles well before the drawing commands for the next triangle get to it. This is globally applicable to consumer hardware no matter how slow or how fast the CPU is, the only factors that even puts a dent in the CPU side timings is the CPU frequency and PCI-e frequency.
So the question becomes. Does that legacy dual-core CPU has a lower frequency than what your comparing it against, and let me point out that outside of high end Intel i-series, CPU frequency hasn't really changed much. PCI-e frequency hasn't changed at all, which is perhaps the biggest limiting factor now.
So why spend £80 so you can spend £60 to get 4GB more memory that won't be as great a change as buying a £160 graphics card that you can migrate to a new computer when you get it?
I don't understand why someone would think this wouldn't work? It's like asking if putting glasses on an older person will help them see better.
While upgrading your older dualcore box may get you playable frame rates on many games you will still suffer from slow load times. This is not likely to be an issue on single player games but for many online multiplayer games you really don't want to be the guy in your group with the slowest load time.
As any geek here would tell you the results will be limited. A modern day video card is almost a computer by itself and doesn't need a CPU. I'm sure Nvidia would agree with this statement and I wish them luck with that. That said however there are games such as MMO's and Battlefield 3 for example that demand more of the CPU than the GPU. I found this out with my Q6600 @ 3.4GHz and 6850 video card. My upgrade to the 6850 from a 3850 mostly shows improvements in benchmarks and a few extra frame rates all around, plus the newest DirectX looks nice in games. The push for my i5-3570K and 8GB of DDR3 upgrade proved to make a more noticeable difference allowing my BF3 settings of low, medium and off to change into settings of high and ultra. But like I said before the results will be limited, just depends on the needs of the application.
-SmokinYoda
Where is my 32 core 10Ghz Beast?
I keep hearing that Ghz is not everything and more cores is the way to go.... Except that desktop CPUs pretty much have the same no' of cores as they did 5 years ago.
The fun's over :-(
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