Thinking upgrade, when do the new processors come out

[SunSamurai]

Just spent 60$ on a CPU. Im getting 40fps @ 1680x1050 on med settings in Crysis.

To me this is a very good indication of the average gamer, simple and plain. So im going to have to go ahead and agree 500$ on a CPU is pure and unmitigated bullshit only for the people with money to burn on the final 10% performance margin. Those days are just done. Over, kaput!

Phenom II x4 OC starts to look pretty damn good, and that is regardless of the economy right now.

Edit: To add insult to injury here, my GPU is my gaming cap now. Not the CPU. 60$.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Just spent 60$ on a CPU. Im getting 40fps @ 1680x1050 on med settings in Crysis.

To me this is a very good indication of the average gamer, simple and plain. So im going to have to go ahead and agree 500$ on a CPU is pure and unmitigated bullshit only for the people with money to burn on the final 10% performance margin. Those days are just done. Over, kaput!

Phenom II x4 OC starts to look pretty damn good, and that is regardless of the economy right now.

Yes that about sums up my feelings. The days of battling for the last 10fps in a game in order to get the advantage over everyone else in the game server is long gone. These days, with the way things are it's not as competitive as far as that goes. Things are more even unless you're on really old hardware that has no business playing the game.

I just hope that in the future Intel doesn't essentially kill PC gaming by making it prohibitively expensive to get features like crossfire or SLI. Having to spend $500 on a motherboard to obtain these features.

 

[cbn]

When will the 32nm Phenom IIs be released?

It is shame Intel is bypassing the idea of 32nm quads till Sandy Bridge. (I guess the competition hasn't been strong enough from AMD)

 

[cbn]

What sucks most is that PC gaming is ridiculously nerfed thanks to 12 year olds with an Xbox 360. Intel is stupid if they think gamers are going to keep buying $500 mobos and $1000 CPUs. PC gaming isn't what it was back in 2000. I honestly don't know any gamer who spends $1000 on a CPU.

I remember back in 1996 CPUs were 200 Mhz (Pentium Pro). Then in 2001 I was seeing 1300 Mhz Intels at Best buy. In 2003 Dell was selling 3000 Mhz Pentiums.

So during this era we are talking single threaded programs scaling linearly with increases in hardware.

Now things have changed a little. Mostly it seems processing speed is relatively stable (although still increasing).....but the number of cores is increasing linearly.

To get games to scale linearly means the software needs to be specifically written multithreaded.

The days of throwing a $1000 CPU at any program and getting a consistent boost are over.

 

[cbn]

What sucks most is that PC gaming is ridiculously nerfed thanks to 12 year olds with an Xbox 360. .

It is a shame these consoles are not geared towards creativity (modding/map making) like PCs are.

I think a lot of good creativity and skill comes out of young people playing with hardware and software. (Too bad I am not good at this)

 

[cbn]

Most high end gamers going for SLI rigs, at least the ones who build it themselves, are also going for value in the CPU market because they know the video card will help more than a faster CPU for almost every game. That same supposed high-end gamer will overclock a lower end cpu and buy high end video cards more often than not.

Yep.

In combination with the change in CPU development (increasing cores >increasing clockspeed).....it is the dropping price of higher and higher resolution monitors that seems to be part of the reason for this.

 

[cbn]

Intel trying to bunch the gamers into server/enterprise price brackets is a bad, bad, bad move. Think about how many people will say "screw it, I like my PC for FPS games but the new Call of Duty is more fun on Xbox Live" and just move on. Inflation aside, I thought as technology improves, prices were supposed to come down on that technology not go up. I think Intel just got greedy because everyone was buying cheap Core2 CPUs and clocking them up. The bad thing for Intel is if they start pushing everyone into buying ultra expensive parts to get gaming performance, those loyal customers might go over to AMD for a better value. Intel thinks they can strong arm everyone, and right now they basically can because AMD's alternative is not much threat performance wise. However, judging on some of the ideas and technical notes about AMD's 2011 roadmap, I'd rethink this idea about "all high end gamers can afford $2k computers" unless they know something we don't. I mean all it would take is for AMD to have a product for less money that performs the same (or possibly better who knows) in games and Intel lost a whole lot of sales.

I think a big problem is lack of multi-threaded programs.

This is probably why Intel is trying to make is us buy Gulftown just so we can get four cores @ 32nm. By the time the software catches up with 6 cores.....something with twelve cores or more will be faster at processing six threaded programs (due to smaller process, better architecture, etc).

 

[cbn]

Deleted

 

[cmdrdredd]

I think a big problem is lack of multi-threaded programs.

This is probably why Intel is trying to make is us buy Gulftown just so we can get four cores @ 32nm. By the time the software catches up with 6 cores.....something with twelve cores or more will be faster at processing six threaded programs (due to smaller process, better architecture, etc).

Possibly but I haven't read anything about 32nm quads. I missed that I guess.

I just hope that PC gaming doesn't become something you spend $500 on a motherboard and $500 on the CPUs that work in that motherboard. At that point I will have to cease being a PC gamer and just use my Xbox 360 or PS3.

 

[cbn]

Possibly but I haven't read anything about 32nm quads. I missed that I guess.

Sorry. There are no 32nm quad cores.....I was just trying to say Intel Gulftown is the only 32nm processor capable of running four threaded games.

I could have worded what I said previously that a whole lot better.

 

[cbn]

I just hope that PC gaming doesn't become something you spend $500 on a motherboard and $500 on the CPUs that work in that motherboard.

I don't see how this could ever happen.

In the old days of single threaded programs and high refresh rate CRTs it was always processor speed holding things back.

Now it seems to be the reverse. It is the software (rather than hardware) that is holding things back (from the CPU side of things).