New Processing CHIP for extreme gaming

[Molly_Millions]

If someone asked me right now what to put in a Gamer-PC I would recommend i5 or PhenomII and a dedicated PCIe GPU.
The software isn't ready for AMDs new architecture.

I built a machine with a Phenom II 965 Black (top of the line AMD at the time), which was totally blown away by the performance of a mid range i5. I personally wouldn't recommend even the best AMD processor for a gaming machine.

[Coldfire]

I built a machine with a Phenom II 965 Black (top of the line AMD at the time), which was totally blown away by the performance of a mid range i5. I personally wouldn't recommend even the best AMD processor for a gaming machine.

I highly doubt you noticed any difference in gaming. Since that isn't possible. No game these days uses more than 30% of an average Quadcore-CPUs cycles. If you switch from AMD CPU+GPU to Intel CPU+nVidia GPU you will notice a difference in some games. That's not because the CPU is much faster but due to some games using PhysX which only works well if a nVidia GPU is present (which is fully intentional).

[Dhalmel]

I highly doubt you noticed any difference in gaming. Since that isn't possible. No game these days uses more than 30% of an average Quadcore-CPUs cycles. If you switch from AMD CPU+GPU to Intel CPU+nVidia GPU you will notice a difference in some games. That's not because the CPU is much faster but due to some games using PhysX which only works well if a nVidia GPU is present (which is fully intentional).

Name a recent game that uses PhysX. You will be hard pressed to find any bieside Borderlands 2 and a few games from 09

BF3 TW2 CIV5 and Skyrim, Borderlands 2, are the games I can think of now that effectively uses a quad core to it's fullest.

[Coldfire]

Name a recent game that uses PhysX. You will be hardpressed to find any.

XCOM
/10char

[Loth]

I highly doubt you noticed any difference in gaming. Since that isn't possible. No game these days uses more than 30% of an average Quadcore-CPUs cycles. If you switch from AMD CPU+GPU to Intel CPU+nVidia GPU you will notice a difference in some games. That's not because the CPU is much faster but due to some games using PhysX which only works well if a nVidia GPU is present (which is fully intentional).

Because we're already working with significantly lower average frame rates (compared to the Intel processors), we don't need to test as many CPUs here. Overclocked to 3.7 GHz, our mystery Phenom II X6 isn't able to add any additional performance, suggesting that clock rate isn't our bottleneck here. In fact, it's the lack of cores and cache that seems to hurt the two Athlon II chips most.

Although every single benchmark result on this page is generated with the help of a GeForce GTX 480, frame rates drop under 40 FPS on the Athlon II X2 system. There's simply not enough processing horsepower in the Athlon II or Phenom II lineups to let our graphics card stretch its legs.

Could it be a problem with Nvidia's GPU? We dropped a Radeon HD 5870 in with our Phenom II flagship to check and came up with 59.19 FPS in the same test (a mere 1.31 FPS difference). Clearly, AMD's CPUs are holding back performance in Cataclysm compared to Intel's processors.

I will grant you that this is an older article, unfortunately nothing much has changed on the AMD side of things in relation to gaming performance (applications optimized for multi-threading is something else).

Link to benchmark: World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm--Tom's Performance Guide

[Coldfire]

WoW isn't the best example as they had to fight with bad performance for years :P
There are definately games that can bottleneck at the CPU, but it's not the norm.
Here is a more recent test:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3224-16.html

[Molly_Millions]

WoW isn't the best example as they had to fight with bad performance for years :P
There are definately games that can bottleneck at the CPU, but it's not the norm.
Here is a more recent test:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3224-16.html

I couldn't care less about WoW, it ran FFXIV horribly compared to the i5 i replaced it with. Sure, this is just my own personal experience, but my personal experience with AMD processors and gaming has never been very good. Therefore, I won't use my hard earned money for one again until I see first hand that one can outperform an Intel chip.

[Coldfire]

I couldn't care less about WoW, it ran FFXIV horribly compared to the i5 i replaced it with.

I got it running on a Phenom II in the background right now... 60 fps, 18% CPU usage <.<
You sure you didn't have the broken AO enabled by accident? That "feature" doesn't even look or run well on my i5...

[Molly_Millions]

I got it running on a Phenom II in the background right now... 60 fps, 18% CPU usage <.<
You sure you didn't have the broken AO enabled by accident? That "feature" doesn't even look or run well on my i5...

Yes, I'm absolutely positive AO was turned off. Believe me, I would have much rather adjusted some settings than build and entirely new box, it would have been much cheaper that way. Regardless, I'm quite satisfied with my i5. I haven't looked back since replacing my other machine, which now runs netflix in my living room quite well. :P

[Loth]

WoW isn't the best example as they had to fight with bad performance for years :P
There are definately games that can bottleneck at the CPU, but it's not the norm.
Here is a more recent test:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3224-16.html

Which shows nothing as to what you were stating, simply because it is not comparing the performance to Intel CPUs, this article only shows the performance of the Trinity (and Llano) APUs, and at a lower quality setting.