i5 Haswell to i7 Kabylake: A Stormblood Benchmark Comparison

[Averax]

Did you overclock at all? It seems you should be doing better than that. With my 6600k @ 4.5ghz, i'm doing about ~13k@ 2k resolution at ~max settings (some unnecessary things turned off). At 1080p you should be doing better

We have the same GPU.

[yotsuffy]

Hi!

I believe that:
- XIV runs on ONE core;
- the process dealing with other players benefits from all core/threads available.
- The benchmark can run XIV, but can't simulate overpopulated places and their servers' CPU requirements.

So I would believe that moving from your 4/4 i5 to your 4/8 i7:
- won't improve XIV much, thus won't give a much better benchmark score;
- but should help keeping a good FPS at overpopulated places.

Is this true? Do you notice a better stability of your FPS at places like Idyllshire?

I'm looking for a CPU capable of keeping 1080p60 anywhere. (No multi-tasking while XIV running.)
Would you consider getting your 4/8 i7 a good idea for someone aiming at 1080p60-no-more-no-less?

[LalaRu]

i5 Haswell [3.40GHz] to i7 Kabylake [3.60GHz]...
increase in average FPS from 88fps to 96fps...
improvements from a CPU upgrade are negligible...
Get a better video card...

I may tell the fps improvement was almost linear with the frequency improvement. But yes, unless playing a game that closes its eyes to the GPU, a better video card is a winning move to get substantial improvements. But with a grain of salt, because after you reach the bottleneck of cpu and mb video bandwidth, anything better goes nowhere, like slotting a 1080ti into a pci express 1.0

[Evaddaragon]

I upgraded from a i7 Ivy Bridge (3770k) to a i7 Kaby Lake (7700k). Difference was pretty negligence. 10% at best. I had the Ivy Bridge for a good 4 years, so it was about due if I wanted to keep up.

However, I got about 30% more when I switched from a 1080 to a 1080 Ti. I usually upgrade and resell my previous GPUs, but usually stay on "regular" X80 variants. I made an exception in this case. Still, after reselling my 1080, board, RAM and CPU, I spent about 850 canadian dollars. In two phases, the GPU being upgrade a month after the rest.

And that's because I made the move to 4K. It was already more than enough for 1080p.

With a 1080 Ti and 7700k, I get 61 average fps at High (Desktop) Settings, and about 55 fps at Max Settings. In 3840 X 2160 of course. Anything below that is overkill.

Before that, I averaged 40 fps with the 3770k and 1080 at 4K Max Settings.

[KarstenS]

2. Almost no screen tearing, as the benchmark has no Vsync.

No tearing without any kind of sync is impossibble by design.

The V in VSync stand for "vertical blank".

When VSync is used, the system waits till the current frame is completely drawn to the screen before exchanging it with the next frame.

When VSync of off, the current frame get exchanged with the next frame while it get drawn to the screen. The result is that the upper part on the screen is a different frame than the lower part. The visible "border" between these two parts is what is called tearing.

[Kaethra]

I was tell people to get* one of three processors (2 for laptop):

i7-4790K, i7-6700k, or i7-7700k (i7-6700HQ or i7-7700HQ for laptop)

Get the first 2 if they're $100 or more cheaper than the 7700k. If not get the 7700k. For the best bang for your buck.

Then get the best GPU you can afford. What this does is allows you to play any game, from any generation. I also tell them to avoid AMD. Now before anyone gets antsy about me saying this. Understand that historically I've been an AMD supporter. The Phenom II's were great processors (and I still believe that they are great up to about 2012-2014). But the newer gen AMDs after the Phenoms were hit and miss. When I played Planetside 2, I saw one and two generation NEWER AMD's perform WORSE than my Older AMD. That never made sense to me. And it came to be that certain AMDs would do certain games and other AMDs would do other games.

Intel has this issue too. Its not as pronounced but it does happen. But in my experience those three (and 2 laptop) CPU's do NOT have that issue. There's also about 2-3 i5's that are good enough especially with a small overclock, but I don't remember which ones off the top of my head. Not many games use Hyperthreading so its not a bad investment.

* Now this advice is given with the idea that you will be playing multiple games over multiple generations, from 1990s through the 2000s, and the 2010's. If all you are doing is playing FFXIV then yes a cheaper i3 or i5 will easily work. In fact if you are limiting your game experience to a small amount of games from one or two generations ago (in PC terms), then I recommend a i5 or possibly one of the new Rytens.

[Mycow8me]

My guess is this game doesnt use more than 2 cores efficiently enough to matter. Even heavensward has a core 2 duo requirement. Having more threads wont matter much unless you are multitasking. You will only see improvements from increasing core (thread) speed and overall architecture performance improvements. Even then, most ppl could disable a core or two to achieve a higher stabler overclock. I only buy overclockable cpus, more bang for your buck.

A gpu upgrade is always going to be the better choice unless you are running a minimum requirement processor. There are game settings that affect proccesors but not as much as the gpu.

[Shyle]

I'm running an I7-2600K (I built this system when the processor was fairly new). And have only ever upgraded the GPU (1070), I firmly believe that the game is definitely GPU dependent above everything else:

edit: Also, when i'm in game, I rarely ever see any noticeable Frame rate drops while in populated cities such as Idyll etc.

[ChocoFeru]

Overclocked my i7 5820K from 4.0Ghz to 4.5Ghz and got 400 more points. It was already overclocked from 3.3Ghz to 4.0Ghz.

Usually the CPU is what lasts longer in your system, so there's no real need to upgrade unless you're into video editting and need that extra power to finish the work faster!

[Riardon]

Anyone with an i5 2500K and above should not worry about a CPU upgrade for this particular game. It doesn't even use more than 2 cores. If you worry about your performance upgrade your GPU and/or overclock your CPU for a free performance bump (assuming you know how to do it ofc).