What is the highest video card that would make sense with an E8400 CPU?

[Will Robinson]

he is probably greatly exaggerating. even at 1920 I did not see a single framerate improvement in very cpu intensive games going from a gtx260 to a gtx470 with my E8500 at 3.8.

Maybe you should update your sig which still says you have one of those 192sp GTX260s....:sneaky:

 

[Jacky60]

I can't believe anyone would say a e8400 would bottleneck a gtx460 768mb.


Lets just take the gpu out of the equation.

What games will a e8400 @ 3.0 and a gtx580 not be able to play smoothly @ 1600x1050?
I know there is 5 or 6 games worth playing that "actually require" a quad core to play above 30fps. What are they?

I'll start.....
GTA IV?

Arma2 I had an e 8400 at 4ghz and 4890 and it was unplayable 0 to 15-20 fps mostly around 13fps

 

[nine9s]

Here are my benchmarking results from:

Unigine
Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS: 31.8
Scores: 800
Min FPS: 13.4
Max FPS: 62.4​

Hardware

Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
CPU flags: 2999MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 HTT
GPU model: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 8.17.12.6099 1024Mb

Settings

Render: direct3d11
Mode: 1680x1050 4xAA fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 16x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: normal


This seems to be comparable to GTX 460 benchamrks (DX11, 1680, 4XAA, tessellation, 16Xanisotropy) with much better CPUs, I think? Does this indicate my CPU is not that much of a bottleneck?

 

[Termie]

Here are my benchmarking results from:

Unigine
Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS: 31.8
Scores: 800
Min FPS: 13.4
Max FPS: 62.4​

Hardware

Binary: Windows 32bit Visual C++ 1500 Release May 21 2010
Operating system: Windows 7 (build 7600) 64bit
CPU model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
CPU flags: 2999MHz MMX SSE SSE2 SSE3 SSSE3 SSE41 HTT
GPU model: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 8.17.12.6099 1024Mb

Settings

Render: direct3d11
Mode: 1680x1050 4xAA fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 16x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: normal


This seems to be comparable to GTX 460 benchamrks with much better CPUs, I think? Does this indicate my CPU is not that much of a bottleneck?

No, unfortunately it does not. Unigine is completely bottlenecked by the GPU. It also scales almost exactly with gpu frequency, which makes it a perfect gpu benchmark. And a terrible cpu benchmark. Try running fraps in an actual game and adjusting AA levels. If you see differences then you have enough cpu power. You're lucky you have this gtx460 to test with. So take advantage of that.

 

[nine9s]

No, unfortunately it does not. Unigine is completely bottlenecked by the GPU. It also scales almost exactly with gpu frequency, which makes it a perfect gpu benchmark. And a terrible cpu benchmark. Try running fraps in an actual game and adjusting AA levels. If you see differences then you have enough cpu power. You're lucky you have this gtx460 to test with. So take advantage of that.

Thanks. Any free demo game to test? Right now I am playing Aion and it seems to be CPU dependent because my CPU is 90% in high traffic area (a lot of players.) so not sure if reliable test. I hope to get Fall Out New Vega in next week or so. Or maybe Bad Company 2.

 

[Termie]

Thanks. Any free demo game to test? Right now I am playing Aion and it seems to be CPU dependent because my CPU is 90% in high traffic area (a lot of players.) so not sure if reliable test. I hope to get Fall Out New Vega in next week or so. Or maybe Bad Company 2.

You could try Dirt 2: http://www.codemasters.com/downloads/details.php?id=39424. I've found it to be somewhat CPU-limited at 1680x1050. There is no BC2 demo, but you could always search around for other games mentioned in these forums. There's a Starcraft II demo, for instance, and I think it could be fairly CPU-limited: https://us.battle.net/account/sc2-demo.html

 

[Skurge]

You could try Dirt 2: http://www.codemasters.com/downloads/details.php?id=39424. I've found it to be somewhat CPU-limited at 1680x1050. There is no BC2 demo, but you could always search around for other games mentioned in these forums. There's a Starcraft II demo, for instance, and I think it could be fairly CPU-limited: https://us.battle.net/account/sc2-demo.html

Yeah, those are good.

There is also Avp http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/05/26/download-aliens-vs-predator-directx-11-benchmark/, Civ5 http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/09/22/download-civilization-v-demo/ and mafia 2 on steam.

Speaking if which. How bad is ubisoft DRM? I just got the HAWX2 benchmark from the PCFormat cover dvd and it asks me t create an account before I can run the benchmark? How retarded is that? I uninstalled it before I ran it.

 

[busydude]

Maybe you should update your sig which still says you have one of those 192sp GTX260s....

IIRC, toyota returned that GTX 470 after using it for a few days.

 

[Skurge]

IIRC, toyota returned that GTX 470 after using it for a few days.

I think he meant the joke that was going around a while ago that toyota a super 192sp GTX260.