i5 Haswell to i7 Kabylake: A Stormblood Benchmark Comparison

[MeoTwister5]

So I went ahead and upgraded my CPU and Mobo to a i7-7700 Kabylake with the appropriate motherboard BIOS update. Wanted to share the benchmarks for people who want a general idea of what to expect. Same video card (GTX 1070) and same SSD (Samsung 850 EVO) on both. Same maximum setting but on borderless as FFXIV becomes unresponsive on my rig at fullscreen DX11 for some reason.

i5-4670 Haswell Benchmark:


i7-7700 Kabylake Benchmark:


This accounts for an overall 1000 score increase. The following observations were also made on the data not present on the general screen.

1. Overall increase in average FPS from 88fps to 96fps. Net 7fps gain all things being equal.

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

3. Overall reduction of loading times from 22s to 18s. Across all 6 scenes it's anywhere from 0.4s to a whole second.

My observations:

1. FPS performance gains are less than 10%, so overall the improvements from a CPU upgrade are negligible at best. From this POV a video card upgrade will be more cost effective.

2. I assume that the decreased screen tearing is due to a better performance match up between CPU and GPU. This could be a good thing for those wanting to really do a CPU upgrade, because maybe now we can turn off Vsync and expect better performance gains.

3. Since my mobo was the same and the adaptors are the same, we could account the loading time improvement squarely on the CPU and not on my SSD. 1 second loading speed reduction might be generally negligible unless you're in highly populated area.

Conclusion: Get a better video card even if it's more expensive. Despite MMO's being CPU heavy, FFXIV will run better on a comparative GPU upgrade than a CPU one. Any 4th gen Intel processor and presumably AMD equivalent will be more than suffice. I can't recommend a CPU upgrade alone for those wanting improved performance.

[File2ish]

That's a fairly decent bump for just a CPU upgrade, granted the difference between the 4670 and 7700 is pretty big (clock speed/bus speed/L3 cache/4 more threads/etc), but I definitely agree with the conclusion. I wouldn't recommend upgrading either if you have at least an intel core i5 haswell (4000 series) CPU. Maybe from an i3 (any gen), or from Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge, but those are still good to run this game (if not quite at max settings in Stormblood). For me; I'll build a new PC eventually, but my i5 4690k and GTX970 will suffice for at least another year, probably :P

And some technobabble for those who might see the term "screen tearing" in the OP and not quite understand what it is: Screen tearing generally occurs because of the refresh rate of your monitor is faster or slower than the amount of frames your computer is sending to your monitor. LCD monitors draw frames from one the top of the screen down to the bottom in rapid succession. If the refresh rate is 60hz, the monitor draws 60 frames per second. A computer can pump more frames out than the monitor can fully draw per second (or less than) unless limited (by like VSync). Screen tearing occurs when the monitor is partway through drawing a frame and either A) the computer sends another frame for the monitor to draw midway through (say like with 60hz monitor and say PC is pushing 90FPS, half of the frames will be drawn something like the top half being part of one frame, and the bottom half being the next sent to be drawn), or B) the monitor refreshes faster than the PC can render so part of a frame will be on the screen longer than another part.

[Riardon]

Anything from an i5 Sandy Bridge and above is good to go for Stormblood. Invest in a better GPU if you want a more significant upgrade unless you are planning to upgrade the whole system for other reasons.

[MeoTwister5]

I have a 144hz monitor, so I assume this would become more evident the higher you push your refresh rates. It became noticeable to me because I got some screen tearing before I changed my CPU.

[DuskTS]

At stock clocks my i5 only achieved scores around 13000 and that was paired with the 1080. However at an overclock to 4.5GHz the score increased to 17000.

The engine clearly responds well to higher clock speeds than anything your GPU is doing. I imagine a 1070 paired with a decently overclocked i7 could get around 17000 as well.

Solution: Overclock if you really want more performance in FFXIV

[MeoTwister5]

Well my i7 is a 7700 non-k and the board is an BIOS updated H170, so I can't OC the thing.

[Iggyplatinum]

i7-4770k seems to get around the same result as i7-7770? Can anyone confirm this?

[Rinuko]

Im thinking of moving from PS4 to PC with a i5 7600k, 16GB 2800mhz DDR4, GTX 1060 6GB. Anyone with similar hardware that can tell me what kind of settings i can play? Obviously even High will be a hugely upgrade from playing on console

[Anzaman]

Conclusion: Get a better video card even if it's more expensive. Despite MMO's being CPU heavy, FFXIV will run better on a comparative GPU upgrade than a CPU one. Any 4th gen Intel processor and presumably AMD equivalent will be more than suffice. I can't recommend a CPU upgrade alone for those wanting improved performance.

Interesting data, here's my score with i7-4790k and GTX 1080.

Average Frame Rate: 114.252

Loading Times by Scene
Scene #1 1.960 sec
Scene #2 2.588 sec
Scene #3 2.201 sec
Scene #4 2.854 sec
Scene #5 5.287 sec
Scene #6 1.292 sec
Total Loading Time 16.183 sec

[DuskTS]

Rinuko, you should be able to crank every setting to maximum and still enjoy 1080p/60fps in dungeons/raids/24 man content. Only 72 man PvP and busy overworld locations such as city states may cause your fps to dip, don't be surprised to see 40 fps in Idyllshire for instance. With your k-model cpu you can OC which will make your performance even more stable and be beneficial if you are using a high refresh rate display (144Hz).
Knock HBAO+ and Real time reflections down a notch and you gain about 15fps or so iirc.