No dual core love in 2015

[frozentundra123456]

I have a HD7770 and hardly any newer game will run 60FPS minimum. One is entitled to their own standards for gameplay, but no way do I consider 60FPS necessary for a good experience. I am playing DA:I at around 30, and it seems perfectly acceptable to me. Most games I play are in the 40 range and I dont consider that bad at all. If someone wants to consider minimum 60FPS for a PC game, they are certainly free to set that standard for their own gaming experience. I dont think it is fair to say everyone will need to reach that mark to be satisfied though.

 

[lyssword]

a 4.7ghz pentium will beat 4.0ghz OC'd q6600, I guarantee it ^^

 

[Maximilian]

The Q6xxx vs. E8xxx was a different argument because the processors were at the same price point.

These days an unlocked quad core i5 is around 3x the money of the unlocked Pentium.

So buy a locked quad.

Buy a locked last generation quad. Its not like being on the latest platform has any real benefits.

 

[ShintaiDK]

You mean the same sort of "Harm to Intel" that Intel themselves is doing by not allowing their SSD caching feature of their H97 / Z97 chipsets to work if you bought a Pentium CPU?

You are already proven wrong in another thread because you dont seem to know what the different technologies are. No more FUD please.

 

[USER8000]

Most of the people arguing for the G3258 are owning Core i5s and Core i7s in their primary PC I suspect.

I wonder if they won't mind ditching their Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs for a G3258 and not upgrading it for two to three years or so while running the latest games based on the latest engines??

It should be perfectly fine,right??

 

[ShintaiDK]

Most of the people arguing for the G3258 are owning Core i5s and Core i7s in their primary PC I suspect.

I wonder if they won't mind ditching their Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs for a G3258 and not upgrading it for two to three years or so while running the latest games based on the latest engines??

It should be perfectly fine,right??

What you also left out that those people with i5 and i7 can actually change affirmity or use OS switches to run it with 2 cores. Hence see the actual result that the limitation is nothing but BS. But I do get why some likes to suddenly champion slow quadcores instead. Guess what these people have in their system?

 

[USER8000]

What you also left out that those people with i5 and i7 can actually change affirmity or use OS switches to run it with 2 cores. Hence see the actual result that the limitation is nothing but BS. But I do get why some likes to suddenly champion slow quadcores instead. Guess what these people have in their system?

So you don't use a G3258 then??

You use a Core i5 or Core i7 since you want to have at least 4 threads for the games you play,since you realise that is the way things are going.

Why not ask people to get a Core i3 instead of a G3258 then?? In many countries its not a massive difference in price at all.

I have been pushing people towards Core i3(or an FX6300 if it made sense) as a minimum for years.

I looked at many threads in the UK for example - not all G3258 CPUs will hit 4.5GHZ all the time,many of budget overclocking motherboards(H and B series) do not have out of the box compatibility and many people are buying better coolers for the Pentiums on top of that.

By that time,you might as well get a cheaper motherboard and a Core i3 for the same cost or lower,unless you really have your heart set on a K series Core i5 and intend to ditch the G3258 within a year or so.

Plus with DX12 and things like Mantle,the Core i3 will be probably OK - I doubt dual cores without HT will show as much improvements due to their lack of threads.

The sudden hatred for the Core i3 CPUs is funny though.

However,as with internet tech forums all this will be forgotten in a year.

 

[ShintaiDK]

So you don't use a G3258 then??

You use a Core i5 or Core i7 since you want to have at least 4 threads for the games you play,since you realise that is the way things are going.

Why not ask people to get a Core i3 instead of a G3258 then?? In many countries its not a massive difference in price at all.

You are changing the goalpost to defend this artificial limit.

The games run fine on dualcores. Its not like you get 10fps because you picked a dualcore. And a dualcore can outperform a slow quadcore in some of these games.

 

[USER8000]

You are changing the goalpost to defend this artificial limit.

The games run fine on dualcores. Its not like you get 10fps because you picked a dualcore. And a dualcore can outperform a slow quadcore in some of these games.

You are changing the goalposts. You bought a Core i5/Core i7 since you want decent multi-threaded performance for the games you play.

If you didn't think that way,you would have ditched your current CPU,and bought a cheap G3258 and had cash to spare.

But you didn't - so your own personal choices betray your own real feelings about it. You have defeated your own argument. I have a Xeon E3 1240 V2 myself,and won't go under a Core i3(or perhaps a FX6300) for any gaming build I will suggest,and suggest people get at least something like a £120 to £130 Core i5 if they can save up a bit longer.

The biggest proponents of the G3258 on forums seem to be those who have Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs.

Put your money where your mouth is and ditch your Core i5/Core i7 and prove to all of use,that a G3258 will be fine for the next two to three years playing games based on newer engines. Yet a Core i3 would not really cost much more once you added all the cost of the overclocking setup(or need to flash the BIOS of the motherboards,which retailers will never confirm will have the latest BIOS version and will cost extra if you don't have a CPU lying around).

Heck,I will make it easier to you - permanently disable half the cores on your Core i5/Core i7 and run it as dual core without HT,and don't change that for a few years.

I know you will try to deflect from this - so I will keep it at that. You can have the last word!

 

[Sheep221]

After 10 years of commecrial dual cores, I'm sure it's good move, with quad cores now having TDP as dual cores, what's the problem? It's not like every game out there will have this kind of ban on gamers' machines anyway.

 

[norseamd]

Welcome to technology that is over 5 years old. Time to upgrade. Considering that the consoles have 8 cores now you might want to wait and see if Intel and AMD come out with more powerful 8 core processors soon.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Welcome to technology that is over 5 years old. Time to upgrade. Considering that the consoles have 8 cores now you might want to wait and see if Intel and AMD come out with more powerful 8 core processors soon.

But the consoles are about as powerful as a dualcore for gaming.

 

[ShintaiDK]

You are changing the goalposts. You bought a Core i5/Core i7 since you want decent multi-threaded performance for the games you play.

If you didn't think that way,you would have ditched your current CPU,and bought a cheap G3258 and had cash to spare.

But you didn't - so your own personal choices betray your own real feelings about it. You have defeated your own argument. I have a Xeon E3 1240 V2 myself,and won't go under a Core i3(or perhaps a FX6300) for any gaming build I will suggest,and suggest people get at least something like a £120 to £130 Core i5 if they can save up a bit longer.

The biggest proponents of the G3258 on forums seem to be those who have Core i5 or Core i7 CPUs.

Put your money where your mouth is and ditch your Core i5/Core i7 and prove to all of use,that a G3258 will be fine for the next two to three years playing games based on newer engines. Yet a Core i3 would not really cost much more once you added all the cost of the overclocking setup(or need to flash the BIOS of the motherboards,which retailers will never confirm will have the latest BIOS version and will cost extra if you don't have a CPU lying around).

Heck,I will make it easier to you - permanently disable half the cores on your Core i5/Core i7 and run it as dual core without HT,and don't change that for a few years.

I know you will try to deflect from this - so I will keep it at that. You can have the last word!

Why do you keep defending artificial limits? Do the games need quadcores? The answer is obviously no from testing.

So again, why? Besides the notion of force feeding everyone with whatever performing quadcores it may be.

Why not increase the limit then. If its not an i5 or i7. Then the game shouldnt run at all. How would you feel about that? AMD is too slow anyway. So lets just remove their entire selection. i3s are dualcores and too slow, so off with those.

 

[NTMBK]

But the consoles are about as powerful as a dualcore for gaming.

In terms of multithreaded throughput, the 8 Jaguar cores are more powerful than a Haswell dual core with Hyperthreading- never mind a non-Hyperthreaded Pentium.

EDIT: Though yes, artificial limits are silly. Let people try to run the game- if their system is too slow to run it, they'll find out soon enough. Just print the minimum and recommended specs on the box.

 

[ShintaiDK]

In terms of multithreaded throughput, the 8 Jaguar cores are more powerful than a Haswell dual core with Hyperthreading- never mind a non-Hyperthreaded Pentium.

EDIT: Though yes, artificial limits are silly. Let people try to run the game- if their system is too slow to run it, they'll find out soon enough. Just print the minimum and recommended specs on the box.

Consoles dont have 8 cores for gaming. They have 6.

And even if you add 50% to the 5150 score it doesnt look good. And thats assuming perfect scaling.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/1224?vs=1265

 

[norseamd]

Still the multithreaded code is going to probably carry over to the PC versions of games from now on. And concerning the power of the console CPU cores it looks like they are a lot of trouble right now for SOE to run Planetside 2 on without massive problems like low framerates and other crap.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Still the multithreaded code is going to probably carry over to the PC versions of games from now on. And concerning the power of the console CPU cores it looks like they are a lot of trouble right now for SOE to run Planetside 2 on without massive problems like low framerates and other crap.

I keep hearing that myth, yet it doesnt really happen. Either the CPU requirement is so low its not to be noticed. Or its simply not there.

So when does it happen, in 3-5 years? Later? The answer may simply be never on the current consoles.

 

[BSim500]

In terms of multithreaded throughput, the 8 Jaguar cores are more powerful than a Haswell dual core with Hyperthreading- never mind a non-Hyperthreaded Pentium.

Actually they aren't:-

Athlon 5350 (4C Jaguar @ 2GHz):-
7Zip - 5,785 (4T)
CineBench - 0.5 1T / 1.97 (4T)
Handbrake - 69.6fps (4T)
WinRAR - 635 1T / 2076 (4T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 - 4.2fps (4T)

Equivalent PS4 & XB1 Consoles (8C Jaguar @ 1.75GHz):-
7Zip - 10,123 (8T)
Cinebench 11.5 - 0.44 1T / 3.5 (8T)
Handbrake - 122fps (8T)
WinRAR - 555 1T / 3633 (8T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 - 7.4fps (8T)

Intel Avoton (8C Atom @ 2.6GHz):-
7Zip - 13,509 (8T)
Cinebench 11.5 - 0.47 1T / 3.77 (8T)
Handbrake - 130.3fps (8T)
WinRAR - 701 1T / 3838 (8T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 - 7.4fps (8T)

i3-4130 (2C/4T @ 3.4GHz):-
7Zip = 10,166 (4T)
Cinebench 11.5 = 1.48 1T / 3.47 (4T)
Handbrake = 154.1fps (4T)
WinRAR = 1178 1T / 3902 (4T)
x264 HD 5.0.1 = 7.6fps (4T)

And that's under "perfect threading" synthetics / video encoding which is usually biased towards "MOAR CORE" chip designs vs real-world less than 100% scalable gaming code (see FX-8350 vs FX-4350 benchies for how a 100% increase in cores often gains as little as 20-30% extra performance even in 2014 games), and excludes the fact (as ShintaiDK said) - consoles can only use 6 out of 8 cores for gaming (so knock off 25%). In reality, per core, the nearest Intel CPU to the consoles is the Avoton C2750 (8-core Atom). Nearest "big core Intel" is a low-end i3-4130-4150. They are nowhere near as fast as people believe, and in actual practice, 6x Jaguar's genuinely are not that far off an OC'd G3258...

 

[Morbus]

Seriously? :\ Bioware are the company who brought us Baldur's Gate and KotOR

Those guys were sublime when I was 15. For adults? Not so much.

KotOR2? Good. Neverwinter Nights 2? Not very good but the Mask of the Betrayer expansion was phenomenal. But they weren't made by Bioware. They were made Obvsidian...

And Obsidian has gone the same way of Bioware anyway, stuck producing actioncraptastic flicks for the consoles.

Activision Blizzard are responsible for Warcraft 3, WoW, Starcraft, Diablo III...

Activision didn't make Warcraft 3, and certainly not Starcraft. StarCraft was made by Blizzard North, and so was Diablo 2. In their genres, those games are bastions of goodness. But Blizzard North is gone now. Now, we have StarCraft II, a pale shadow of StarCraft II, and Diablo III, an insult and spit in the face of Diablo II fans. Sure, they are fine games, I won't argue that, but they are worse than their previous iterations.

And that's my opinion, but the opinion of many old fans as well. I won't claim that means it's true, but what I'm saying is I'm not alone.

They have made some absolutely fantastic PC games between them.

But they don't do them anymore. I'm with you that their older games are good, head and shoulders above many, but they don't do them anymore.

Mass Effect is a poorly executed shooter with a couple of binary plot choices and a terrible character system. Dragon Age (the original) is worse than Neverwinter Nights (the original) in all aspects bar graphics and voice acting, and the newer Dragon Ages are jokes (they oughta be, seriously).

Blizzard, on the other hand, is stuck in a vicious cycle of internal iterative design from people with no passion for their games, spewing out WoW expansions, the phenomenally dumbed down Diablo 3 (it's a very well dumbed down game, for sure, they did a fine job of it), and the ever-late StarCraft stuff. And their other games that pay so little tribute to Blizzard's name I can't even remember their names, despite having tried them...

I don't mean to insult anyone though. You're all free to like whatever, I don't mind

 

[Flapdrol1337]

And that's under "perfect threading" synthetics / video encoding which is usually biased towards "MOAR CORE" chip designs vs real-world less than 100% scalable gaming code (see FX-8350 vs FX-4350 benchies for how a 100% increase in cores often gains as little as 20-30% extra performance even in 2014 games)

Yes, performance is not an issue on the overclocked G3258. It's the games refusing to start due to the game wanting to run its main thread on the 3rd core (core "2", because count starts at 0).

I suspect it makes sense for optimisation, as there's probably always some things running on core 0, and core 1 might be a hyperthread, or on the same module, and on an i5 running on the 3rd core wouldn't hurt.

The overclocked pentium is the only straight dualcore with good per-core performance, and it's pretty rare, it's not that strange it wasn't tested. Will probably get patched if people harass the gamedevelopers enough on twitter or something, maybe they could set it to start on the last core if this is indeed the problem.

 

[SPBHM]

Equivalent PS4 & XB1 Consoles (8C Jaguar @ 1.75GHz):-

PS4 is 1.6GHz

 

[cantholdanymore]

Seems its by MS and Sony, to somehow make their consoles look better than they are.

 

[Remobz]

Yes, performance is not an issue on the overclocked G3258. It's the games refusing to start due to the game wanting to run its main thread on the 3rd core (core "2", because count starts at 0).

I suspect it makes sense for optimisation, as there's probably always some things running on core 0, and core 1 might be a hyperthread, or on the same module, and on an i5 running on the 3rd core wouldn't hurt.

The overclocked pentium is the only straight dualcore with good per-core performance, and it's pretty rare, it's not that strange it wasn't tested. Will probably get patched if people harass the gamedevelopers enough on twitter or something, maybe they could set it to start on the last core if this is indeed the problem.

I think it might get patched as well.

 

[tential]

You are changing the goalposts. You bought a Core i5/Core i7 since you want decent multi-threaded performance for the games you play.

So because some users are willing to purchase an i7, people who could only afford a dualcore, who can still play the game with great framerates, should be artificially locked out?

By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a Mercedes, anyone who has a car less than $35,000 shouldn't be allowed on highways.
By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a 70 inch+ HDTV, anyone with a smaller TV shouldn't be allowed to access High Definition Cable. Only standard definition for people using less than 70 inches.

Etc.

Your logic is extremely flawed from the start.

 

[Abwx]

and in actual practice, 6x Jaguar's genuinely are not that far off an OC'd G3258...

If we assume that a single core is as efficient when dealing with three threads individualy that it is when executing them simultaneously, wich is not the case, the CPU cache will be cut in three statisticaly speaking and the CPU will lose intrinsical IPC per thread.