Originally posted by: chizow
Originally posted by: toyota
well I already said FEAR 2 was not all that demanding but wanted to show that even at 1680 on max settings that differences between the cpus are quite large. they didnt even have a lot of the much slower cpus that many people have even on there.
Your analysis is spot-on, its so blatantly obvious CPUs are significant bottlenecks even with fast single-GPUs and its even more obvious that there's almost no point at all in going SLI or CF without pairing them with the fastest overclocked CPU solutions available. Jensen was clearly wrong here, the CPU isn't diminishing in importance for games, if anything he needs faster CPUs more than ever to drive his GPUs.
Even in that FEAR 2 example, its clearly obvious the CPU benefits and scales as much as a faster GPU to the point where a faster CPU with a slower GPU results in the same or better frame rates as the faster GPU paired with a slower CPU:
55.6 FPS = 1680x0AA
GTX 280 + E6420 @ 2.13GHz
92.9 FPS = 1680x0AA
GTX 285 + E8400 @ 3.6GHz
66.5 FPS = 1680x0AA
8800 Ultra + E8400 @ 3.6GHz
56.1 FPS = 1680x4AA
8800 Ultra + E8400 @ 3.6GHz
Its blatantly obvious what's going on here, there's heavy CPU bottlenecking in modern games to the point you absolutely need faster CPUs to maximize performance of single-GPU solutions. Its so prevalent that a slower GPU will outperform a faster GPU if the slower GPU is paired with a faster CPU. Its also obvious CPU bottlenecking is still an issue at higher resolutions with AA as slow CPUs result in lower max FPS than potential FPS with faster CPUs even with AA enabled.
GTA4 - 13 CPU round-up
COD4 + GRiD - Intel CPU Clock for Clock Comparison @ 2GHz
COD5 - 12 Intel and AMD CPUs
Far Cry 2 - various speeds
Left 4 Dead - various speeds
Fallout 3
Most of those reviews are done at low resolutions without AA, however, they clearly show scaling with faster CPUs with fast single-GPU solutions. The most important thing to take away from these graphs if you have a slower CPU is that if you're seeing 30-40FPS and you think that's low, upgrading your GPU
may not increase your FPS at all. You can upgrade your GPU and crank up AA to 4x or 8x and max out all settings with minimal penalty but you may still see the same low FPS and as Toyota said, lower minimums as you are CPU bottlenecked.
Its amazing some people still refuse to acknowledge these facts when they're readily available in published benchmarks and easily tested and verified. Again, Toyota provided some clear examples in Crysis, which is easily one of the most consistent and easily replicated benchmarks around. CPU speed and multi-threading are going to become increasingly important as has already been shown by both Nvidia and ATI's focus on recent performance boosts from multi-threaded drivers in DX10/Vista, benefits Derek mentioned would be fully realized with DX11.