[Toms] CPU bottlenecking in games - the <$200 CPUs

[Bman123]

If AMD can't do better with the IPC they need to hire some new people because this shit is getting old really fast.

 

[AtenRa]

I will quote again,

I agree with you that games should utilize 4 cores in this day. However, even in a game that uses 4 cores, an Intel i2500 is much faster than "8 core" bulldozer.

From anands FX hot fix

I dont see Intel Core i5/7 being "much faster" than AMDs 8core CPUs.

Honestly,

Most DX-11 games will be just fine with all today's 4 Thread CPUs at 1080p and above when paired with a good Graphics Card, and FX 6 and 8 core CPUs are in par with Intel in those environments.
However, there are some games that really are much faster with Intels CPUs but that games either only use two cores like SC2 or are more optimized for the Intel architecture.

Taking only SC and Skyrim and conclude that FX CPUs are sub-par in gaming (1080p+) than Intel Core i CPUs in general is a misconception.

 

[beginner99]

the funny part is that, blizzard tryed hard to make a competitive level for 2x2 or 3x3 in SC2...
they dropped the idea, because the pros couldn't do anything due the major lag when 4 armies atacked each other...

google mothership lag too.

imho...blizzard failed even harder at sc2 coding, than amd at bulldozer

i bet it will take more than 5 years to see a cpu that don't fry in a 4x4 zerglings only game.

I agree. It's the same as with SC1. I think SC1 specs was a pentium 90 Mhz but the game lagged even on pentium 2 if you there were enough units like carriers. .

I remember I used to play it on a 200 Mhz pentium and it started to lag even in 2x2 fastest rather quickly so I had 1 move: zealot rush. always.

 

[infoiltrator]

Tom's Hardware did not say you cannot game on BD chips. Or that BD chips were bad.
They have been saying on a price prformance basis Phenom II chips were better peformers in $/frame rate.
Tom's even kept the AthlonII X3 455 as the reccommended CPU and the Phenom II 955 at honorable mention.

In the the January listing, IN Peformance Per Dollar gaming chips, Sandy Bridge is reccommended.
On those two criteria, and those only.
AMD may be able to accomplish great things. Ivy Bridge may fall on its face.

The fact is if you are running a $50/$60 Celeron chip you can upgrade a lot.
If you are running a PhenomII X4 or X6 or BD FX you probably won't HAVE to go up scale. Which is well since you have all AMD has.

So please be reasonable. Sandy Bridge isn't magic. AMD BD is playable.

Just if I'm counting my money, SB wins.
$120 buys an I3 21xx. $180 buys an I5 2400. $220 buys an I5 2500K.

Yeah, living near MicroCenter may change that a little in the $s spent.
Most people do not.

Seems to me those charts skipped overclocking too. But overclocking costs!

 

[RavenSEAL]

I will quote again,

From anands FX hot fix

I dont see Intel Core i5/7 being "much faster" than AMDs 8core CPUs.

Honestly,

Most DX-11 games will be just fine with all today's 4 Thread CPUs at 1080p and above when paired with a good Graphics Card, and FX 6 and 8 core CPUs are in par with Intel in those environments.
However, there are some games that really are much faster with Intels CPUs but that games either only use two cores like SC2 or are more optimized for the Intel architecture.

Taking only SC and Skyrim and conclude that FX CPUs are sub-par in gaming (1080p+) than Intel Core i CPUs in general is a misconception.

 

[BD231]

 

[boxleitnerb]

Certainly CPU power doesn't matter in every game. In many games you will hardly notice a difference between BD and Sandy. But...
If you play a game that relies heavily on CPU power, do you want to make compromises? What if you play Skyrim or Multiplayer or MMORPG or strategy with demanding AI etc? Or use SLI/CF. The point is, Sandy has more reserve that is there if you need it. For the same cost and lower power consumption.

You cannot generalize, but that goes for both ways.

 

[soccerballtux]

Toms offers very narrow focused reviewing and provides superficial insight in their analysis. Don't go there.

The Skyrim CPU dependency has been tested before following the 11.11.11 release, not one of Tom's web-journalists however offered but a single thought on how to alleviate it or on what causes it. They also use an OLD, by now completely irrelevant build 1.2.14.0 of Skyrim (from November 2011), and "FRAPS runs", with NO mention of recent performance boosting patches.

Which speaks to Toms' awful timing, those articles were done just before the performance fixing patch 1.4, similarly how they launched 2 articles on FX-8150s power efficiency, 2 weeks before the scheduling fix was released, making their results effectively irrelevant. My guess is also that they reuse and repackage their testing to phone in new articles every now and again with a new and ever so narrow focus.

All Tomshardware does is pimp purchasing decisions based on random out of context observations. Not every benchmark has to concluded with Brand A is better than Brand B. It's all just trolling of ignorant hicks to fuel the platform wars for the purpose of advertisement clicks.

But maybe you are young and think a self-respecting site could get away calling itself "The Authority on Tech" without upsetting people who know that there is no authority but the truth, when it comes to things you can reproduce, measure and prove. Even though most people need authoritative advice choosing hardware (that's why those sites exist), let's hope that this advice comes from a position of up-to-date insight and carefully weighed arguments not self-proclaimed authority and randomly rehashed results.

I have a feeling they get paid to post pro-Intel garbage. Last time it was this:

Cores 4 and 5 make no difference but 6 does, and they don't even bother questioning it? :/

 

[skipsneeky2]

Here is some interesting results i did based off the Hard reset demo ...

Hard reset demo benchmark i3 2100+gtx560oc=32min,67avg,117max
hard reset demo benchmark i5 2500k+gtx560oc=39min,77avg,130+max

1920x1080 all maxed settings fxaa 2x no vsync don't be fooled even some games like Crysis would see a improvement so the processor matters very much in plenty of games.

 

[Termie]

UPDATE:

Tom's has now put two ~$120 CPUs, the i3-2100 and the FX4100, under the microscope, using a variety of graphics cards (5570, 6770, 6850, and 6950), to determine the best bang-for-the-buck setup:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-4100-core-i3-2100-gaming-benchmark,3136.html

Take-aways: with anything under a 6950, you'd be hard-pressed to see any differences between these two CPUs - the GPU will be the limiting factor in reasonable budget builds. Metro2033 and StarCraft stand out as exceptions, however, where the 2100 pulls away with lesser cards.

Tom's Verdict:

"The good news is that AMD fans can still enjoy games on a capable machine without spending a ton of cash. With that established, though, getting in the door with an LGA 1155-based platform costs about the same and yields a more consistently-good experience."

 

[AtenRa]

If you dont want to OC then yes the i3 is better but,
FX 4100 is unlocked, you only have to raise the multiplier in order to get a nice Overclock that will make it perform better than i3.

 

[pelov]

If you dont want to OC then yes the i3 is better but,
FX 4100 is unlocked, you only have to raise the multiplier in order to get a nice Overclock that will make it perform better than i3.

And you have to factor in the cost of buying a heftier PSU as well as cooling and that you're getting a rehashed chipset on AM3+. I know you're an AMD guy, and so am I, but ignoring certain obvious downsides of BD isn't going to overturn peoples' valid opinions in stating the architecture sucks...hard.

Games tend to be floating point heavy, thus BD's claim of 4 "cores" goes down the toilet. They messed up pretty bad. It's also not surprising to see that the further down you go in module count the worse off you are despite the comparatively large amounts of cache. The only reason to buy AM3+ is for a heavily OC'd 8120 and if you need the extra integer cores, and that appeals to an incredibly small amount of people. It doesn't matter how much L2+L3 it has if it's all slow =P

 

[exar333]

And you have to factor in the cost of buying a heftier PSU as well as cooling and that you're getting a rehashed chipset on AM3+. I know you're an AMD guy, and so am I, but ignoring certain obvious downsides of BD isn't going to overturn peoples' valid opinions in stating the architecture sucks...hard.

Games tend to be floating point heavy, thus BD's claim of 4 "cores" goes down the toilet. They messed up pretty bad. It's also not surprising to see that the further down you go in module count the worse off you are despite the comparatively large amounts of cache. The only reason to buy AM3+ is for a heavily OC'd 8120 and if you need the extra integer cores, and that appeals to an incredibly small amount of people. It doesn't matter how much L2+L3 it has if it's all slow =P

Thats a good point.

If you plan to OC, it really is a comparison against the FX 4100 and the Intel 2300 or 2400. I would still go Intel here...

If you already have an AMD, and you mostly want to game, it should serve you fine for most standard setups. If you plan to XF/SLI expensive GPUs, it just makes sense to get the best CPU combo around for the price (or not) and go 2500K+ on the Intel side.

 

[exar333]

Overall a good review from TH, but I wish they had included 4 more CPU configs:

G630, FX 6100, and i5-2400, and the FX 4100 OCd to 4.6ghz. That would have really put a budget CPU purchase in perspective for potential buyers.

 

[pelov]

Overall a good review from TH, but I wish they had included 4 more CPU configs:

G630, FX 6100, and i5-2400, and the FX 4100 OCd to 4.6ghz. That would have really put a budget CPU purchase in perspective for potential buyers.

I'm assuming the lack of others had to do with the price, so they pitted the 2-module part against the 2-core+HT part.

I remember reading the [H] thread where AMD's engineer stated the architecture wasn't meant for the desktop but rather a server part on a desktop platform. This makes quite a bit of sense when you see stuff like this. It's intent was to use a CMT approach and offer more integer cores and lots of cache, but when scaling down you're losing its main advantages: cost-per-core and more cores. I can't imagine AMD is making much $$ off those 2-module parts considering just how close they are in cache size compared to their 4-module bigger brothers, again, a strictly server thing.

Makes me wonder if they'll increase the size of the WCC between the L1 and L2 or rather try to drastically decrease the latency of the L2 cache altogether. I'd imagine the latter would provide better results but would also require a more conservative clock speed? If that's true and Piledriver cores on Trinity are already at the 4ghz mark on APUs I'm not that optimistic for any significant gains in IPC on Vishera.

 

[AtenRa]

And you have to factor in the cost of buying a heftier PSU as well as cooling and that you're getting a rehashed chipset on AM3+. I know you're an AMD guy, and so am I, but ignoring certain obvious downsides of BD isn't going to overturn peoples' valid opinions in stating the architecture sucks...hard.

Games tend to be floating point heavy, thus BD's claim of 4 "cores" goes down the toilet. They messed up pretty bad. It's also not surprising to see that the further down you go in module count the worse off you are despite the comparatively large amounts of cache. The only reason to buy AM3+ is for a heavily OC'd 8120 and if you need the extra integer cores, and that appeals to an incredibly small amount of people. It doesn't matter how much L2+L3 it has if it's all slow =P

First off all,
Im not an AMD guy, i use CPUs from both AMD and Intel. I also use GPUs from both AMD and NV.

Now that we have cleared that up,

FX4100 can OC up to 4.2GHz with only 1.28-1.3V(sometimes even less). You don't need a bigger Heat-sink or bigger PSU. Not to mention you getting more motherboard features at the same price vs Intel.

 

[blckgrffn]

Not too be annoying, but you can get the FX-4100 with a free motherboard for $100 at Micro Center. For those that can take advantage of this deal (or the 6100+mobo @ $140) it makes more sense to put that money towards a better video card and PSU than that ~$200 is takes to get into an i3 setup.

Who is buying a PSU that is smaller than 400W for a gaming rig these days? And it really appears that the full on gap is something like 40W, so yeah, I suppose you should bump up from that Earthwatts 380 to the 430? For $5 or something? The video card in this scenario is MUCH more likely to determine what you need for a PSU compared to the CPU.

For those that would talk about power consumption, I think it is interesting that a 4100 under load is on par for a stock clocked 2600k. Yes, it does much less work with the given power usage but it is not like this is some Power7 chip we are talking about here. See review:

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1766/15/

What strikes me is how high the idle power is in that review. I could have sworn it was closer to SB than that...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4955/the-bulldozer-review-amd-fx8150-tested/9

It appears that Legit Reviews just has a much more efficient SB testing platform than Anandtech...

For $150 you can get the 4100 and an Asrock 970a board if you want a nicer board to go with that CPU, which addresses what AtenRa is pointing out about features for the price.

I realize that this does not apply to everyone...

 

[pelov]

You do need a bigger PSU even at idle speeds. See the 95WTDP compared to the 65W? That's 30W already. Any OCing on top of that will only increase that gap to mitigate the performance gap. This isn't a big deal, just buy a PSU with 100W more and you should be safe. But it's still 100W more and requires a beefier PSU.

As far as features go, outside of PCIE lanes and SATA 6GB/s ports, you gain nothing from an AMD mobo. Intel offers more with Lucid + HD2000/3000 and SSD caching. Really the only thing you get from an AMD mobo that you're missing from Intel is the extra PCIE bandwidth which will be erased as soon as IVB comes to market with PCIE 3.0 support both in-chip and on-board. If we were comparing 1156 to AM3 then you'd have been right. 1156 sucked and was expensive when compared to similar AM3 boards that offered more. Instead of producing a new chipset, AMD decided to rehash their old 8xx chipset and only tweak it a bit and slap it on AM3+. Higher ram speeds (which is IMC dependent as well...), SLi and Turbo 2.0 is what you've gained from going from 8xx > 9xx. Does that sound like a new chipset to you?

 

[BD231]

While it’s true that AMD’s multiplier-unlocked models appeal to tweak-happy power users, the company's overclocked game performance manages to either hang close to or fall just behind Intel's stock Core i3-2100

As much as I'd love to blame consoles u simply can't when you consider AMD is involved in making the second most popular gaming console in America. I'm just going to forget AMD exists moving forward and wait to hear something positive in a few years, they're shipwrecked for now.

 

[krumme]

You are a bunch of gaming nerds, talking desktop cpu performance with the same enthusiasm as we did 20 years ago, when we overclocked the cpu changing crystal on the motherboard

For the last 30 years, AMD generally havnt earned their own money. They have been burning money since the dawn of time.

In these years they consistently start to earn their own money. That is some kind of change.
Not that it is in any way comparable to Intel, and i guess Intel doesnt look at AMD as their main competitor. Hopefully they dont.

Remember, K7 was more or less bought from outside, and before, all their cpu was copies. They havnt been making cpu from scratch for more than 10 Years.

 

[blckgrffn]

While it’s true that AMD’s multiplier-unlocked models appeal to tweak-happy power users, the company's overclocked game performance manages to either hang close to or fall just behind Intel's stock Core i3-2100

As much as I'd love to blame consoles u simply can't when you consider AMD is involved in making the second most popular gaming console in America. I'm just going to forget AMD exists moving forward and wait to hear something positive in a few years, they're shipwrecked for now.

Second? They made the GPUs for the 360 & the Wii. And likely all three of the next consoles, so... yeah. If consoles crash and burn, I guess you can blame them for that too

 

[skipsneeky2]

I really hate the BF3 benchmarks from toms hardware,those charts to me are horseshit and need to be abolished from all forum threads.

I went from a i3 2100 to the i5 2500k and there was a difference mostly minimum framerate so i could excuse those numbers as boogus if your playing multiplayer.

Also i had a nice giggle about the dirt 3 charts,LOL at the pentium g860 outgaming the fx 4100,completely unexpected hell throw in a pentium d to rub the salt in the wound at this point.

 

[soccerballtux]

starcraft2 needs to die as a benchmark. They might as well have coded it in a single thread given how poorly it performs.

I bet with whatever expac comes next they will say it "includes numerous multithreaded performance enhancements" but it'll be the same story-- Core 1 handles ALL units (hence slowdowns), core 2 handles graphics computations, core 3 handles audio, and WoW!!!111 it's multithreaded!!! Er, not really, considering even the pros in their 4ghz i7s can't do 3v3 and 4v4 and you still couldn't do a zergling war if your life depended on it. Grumble grumble

 

[infoiltrator]

Now let us have a retest using a GPU in the $150-200 range. Preferably an Nvidia to see what difference it makes.

 

[Dribble]

starcraft2 needs to die as a benchmark. They might as well have coded it in a single thread given how poorly it performs.

I think you are missing the point. We want a cpu that can play whatever game we like well, not one that forces you to "throw away" games that you deem are "badly coded". SC2 is a great choice because it is a popular game, and it does need cpu grunt - how well it's coded isn't relevant here.