New Processing CHIP for extreme gaming

[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

[Soukyuu]

Hard to trust AMD when it comes to drivers and performance for me. Now, before you jump me with "omg but Radeon = best buck for money!" etc, let me elaborate. First, I completely agree with this:

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'm running that CPU myself, and the performance is quite "meh" compared to an i5. But not only that: I have trouble keeping it at it's specified temperature and I already installed the biggest heatsink that holds an i5 at ~40°C while my Phenom reaches 60°C regularly.

This means it has a much worse TDP, resulting in higher electricity bills. So yes, they might be cheaper, but they get more expensive in the long term.

Second, I have the E-350 APU. The driver support is HORRIBLE. Half of the time, I get a "this driver is not compatible for your system" after downloading a driver package explicitly labeled as being compatible with the E-350. The other half of the time, the CCC complains it doesn't like the driver and refuses to load. Next comes image quality: using DVI, I often get random line artifacts on screen. Using HDMI, it refuses to scale to my 1080p screen, leaving black bars at the edges. Yes, even when enabling overscan.

This is not a hardware defect as I already tried multiple monitors and replaced the suspected defective APU.

And third: the only GPU that died on me so far was an ATI.

[Dhalmel]

OP why did you capitalize chip for?

AMD is alright for budget minded consumers, I was a long time user of AMD till Intel's Nehalem.

AMD's apu are pretty impressive, but at the same while you could just buy an Intel i3 + dedicated gpu for a little more.

It will probably run Reborn fine at conservative settings.
If you do plan to go to Trinity be sure to buy 1866MHZ ram, the graphics performance in AMD's APUs are highly influenced by the memory speed.

[Babydoll]

I think I'll stick with intel. =X Had enough of AMD crappy PC's over the years lol...now that I can actually afford intel...yeah.

[Loth]

Go read some reviews, they (the reviews) were released about two weeks ago.
Unless you are willing to go with low(er) details and accept that some games will lag, then no, I sure hope noone will use the performance of the trinity line as a recommended specs for their games.

[Coldfire]

Go read some reviews, they (the reviews) were released about two weeks ago.
Unless you are willing to go with low(er) details and accept that some games will lag, then no, I sure hope noone will use the performance of the trinity line as a recommended specs for their games.

Most games are designed to run on 8 year old consoles. Any 3Ghz dualcore can run those games perfectly... and the new AMD quadcores are basically like Intel dualcores :P
And reducing details usually doesn't fix it if a CPU is too slow. The games won't lag they will just run in slowmotion.

[Majidah]

i5 3570k ivy bridge OC

/thread