Hey everyone. I'll be upgrading my video card to an 8800 GTX in a few weeks along with a suitable PSU. A part of me wants to do a whole new intel build, but a slightly more reasonable side is telling me to just upgrade the video card and buy a suitable PSU. I would like to be able to play games like Crysis and the new Command and Conquer and I'm wondering if I would have to do a whole new Intel Build to get frame rates in the upper 50s. I'll also be purchasing a 2407WFP soon, so I would like to play games at it's native resolutions with good frame rates. I'm thinking I should be ok with this CPU for another year or so as long as I get the 8800 GTX. I would just like to know what the Hive Mind's thoughts are on this issue. Any help on this is greatly appreciated
Current CPU still up to par for DX10 games?
- Thread starter kman79
- Start date
It should handle it for the moment, but you may want to look at an upgrade in the next year or so.
You may find this article interesting if you haven't already read it:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/29/geforce_8800_needs_the_fastest_cpu/
Bottom line: Will it hold you back compared to a faster CPU? Yes. Will it still be blazing fast? Yep.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/11/29/geforce_8800_needs_the_fastest_cpu/
Bottom line: Will it hold you back compared to a faster CPU? Yes. Will it still be blazing fast? Yep.
i think you have the right idea to upgrade your video card rather than your whole system.
IMHO, upgrading your video card will give you more bang for the buck than upgrading your whole system since you will need a new psu, ram, mobo, and processor vs. a new video card + psu.
and the GTX is FAST!!! i'm actually kind of jealous
IMHO, upgrading your video card will give you more bang for the buck than upgrading your whole system since you will need a new psu, ram, mobo, and processor vs. a new video card + psu.
and the GTX is FAST!!! i'm actually kind of jealous
Well said.
To add to that, whether the CPU will be a bottleneck depends on the kind of game you will be playing. Most games are generally more dependant on GPU speed rather than CPU speed, but there are exceptions such as flight simulators and RTS games which are often quite CPU bound.
If you look at those graphs, you can see that the impact of the cpu decreases as you increase the video resolution, even more so with AA+AF enabled.
keep the cpu, theres very little need to upgrade. also, remember in a few months when dx10 games start coming out, dx10 is alot less cpu dependant than dx9.
Thank you for the link, it was very helpful and informative. Your bottom line statement is exactly to the point and true. I can see where there would be some improvements with a new CPU setup, but staying with my current setup with a 8800 GTX is not half bad either. I'm good to go for at least another year I hope.
I appreciate the responses guy, thanks for the help.
DX10 allows a lot more calculations to be handled by the GPU so the CPU can send less information for the same end result. However, games in DX10 are going to utilise these advantages as much as they can, so you still need more CPU for more performance.
The real issue is that a 2700 MHz X2 is fast enough for anything out there now. Converting to Intel will see a performance increase, but if you are using an 8800 you are most likely cranking the eye candy which will greatly reduce the advantage of a different CPU. We should at least wait for true multi threaders like Crysis to be tested for a while before we are forced to switch, and by then AMD may have a quad as well, bringing down all of the prices.
From http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/p-4.html:
"DirectX 10 will increase game performance by as much as six to eight times. Much of that will be accomplished with smarter resource management, improving API and driver efficiencies, and moving more work from the CPU to the GPU. "The entire API and pipeline have been redesigned from the ground-up to maximize performance, and minimize CPU and bandwidth overhead," according to Microsoft. Furthermore, "The idea behind D3D10 is to maximize what the GPU can do without CPU interaction, and when the CPU is needed it?s a fast, streamlined, pipeline-able operation." Giving the GPU more efficient ways to write and access data will reduce CPU overhead costs by keeping more of the work on the video card.
Here's a list of several new Direct3D 10 performance improvements GameSpot was able to wrestle out of the DirectX 10 team:
New constant buffers maximize efficiency of sending shader constant data (light positions, material information, etc.) to the GPU by eliminating redundancy and massively reducing the number of calls to the runtime and driver. New state objects significantly reduce the amount of API calls and bandwidth, tracking, mapping, and validation overhead needed in the runtime and driver to change GPU device state.
Texture arrays enable the GPU to swap materials on-the-fly without having to swap those textures from the CPU.
Resource views enable super-fast binding of resources to the pipeline by informing the system early-on about its intended use. This also vastly reduces the cost of hazard-tracking and validation.
Predicated rendering allows draw calls to be automatically deactivated based on the results of previous rendering - without any CPU interaction. This enables rapid occlusion culling to avoid rendering objects that aren?t visible.
Shader Model 4.0 provides a more robust instruction set with capabilities like integer and bitwise instructions, enabling more work to be transferred to the GPU.
The D3D runtime itself has been completely refactored to maximize performance and configurability by the application.
It remains to be seen just how well actual DX10 graphics hardware will be able to handle the additional work, but we've seen in the past that ATI and Nvidia have been able to deliver whenever games have shifted work from the CPU to the GPU."
The real issue is that a 2700 MHz X2 is fast enough for anything out there now. Converting to Intel will see a performance increase, but if you are using an 8800 you are most likely cranking the eye candy which will greatly reduce the advantage of a different CPU. We should at least wait for true multi threaders like Crysis to be tested for a while before we are forced to switch, and by then AMD may have a quad as well, bringing down all of the prices.
From http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/p-4.html:
"DirectX 10 will increase game performance by as much as six to eight times. Much of that will be accomplished with smarter resource management, improving API and driver efficiencies, and moving more work from the CPU to the GPU. "The entire API and pipeline have been redesigned from the ground-up to maximize performance, and minimize CPU and bandwidth overhead," according to Microsoft. Furthermore, "The idea behind D3D10 is to maximize what the GPU can do without CPU interaction, and when the CPU is needed it?s a fast, streamlined, pipeline-able operation." Giving the GPU more efficient ways to write and access data will reduce CPU overhead costs by keeping more of the work on the video card.
Here's a list of several new Direct3D 10 performance improvements GameSpot was able to wrestle out of the DirectX 10 team:
New constant buffers maximize efficiency of sending shader constant data (light positions, material information, etc.) to the GPU by eliminating redundancy and massively reducing the number of calls to the runtime and driver. New state objects significantly reduce the amount of API calls and bandwidth, tracking, mapping, and validation overhead needed in the runtime and driver to change GPU device state.
Texture arrays enable the GPU to swap materials on-the-fly without having to swap those textures from the CPU.
Resource views enable super-fast binding of resources to the pipeline by informing the system early-on about its intended use. This also vastly reduces the cost of hazard-tracking and validation.
Predicated rendering allows draw calls to be automatically deactivated based on the results of previous rendering - without any CPU interaction. This enables rapid occlusion culling to avoid rendering objects that aren?t visible.
Shader Model 4.0 provides a more robust instruction set with capabilities like integer and bitwise instructions, enabling more work to be transferred to the GPU.
The D3D runtime itself has been completely refactored to maximize performance and configurability by the application.
It remains to be seen just how well actual DX10 graphics hardware will be able to handle the additional work, but we've seen in the past that ATI and Nvidia have been able to deliver whenever games have shifted work from the CPU to the GPU."
Put it this way -
What would you prefer?
1900xtx
Core 2 @ 3.2 ( to be reasonable )
or
8800gtx
X2 @ 2700
All games are played @ 1920x1200
I know im going the later
What would you prefer?
1900xtx
Core 2 @ 3.2 ( to be reasonable )
or
8800gtx
X2 @ 2700
All games are played @ 1920x1200
I know im going the later
m1ldslide1
Platinum Member
- Feb 20, 2006
- 2,321
- 0
- 0
I have a similar setup, and I'm definately going to ride it out for a while. The first thing I'll splurge on is a new video card, but then maybe late '07 or early '08 I'll make the jump to C2D or whatever the hot thing is. Seems like there isn't a game out that a 2.6ghz dual-core AMD wouldn't be able to run on max settings with a 8800GTX. And my guess is that there won't be for a while, especially with new multithreaded engines on the horizon.
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