Instead of pissing around 'refining' their fake cores, why don't they just stop being such tight-arses and give the mainstream more real cores. Same fun without the trade-off, happy days for all.
So I'm good for another 2 years of 1080p gaming. Cool.
I have the same CPU at 4.8Ghz and same mobo and my reading of this thread is making me think the opposite. I can't deny I have those frame rate drops in Crysis 3 that are being spoken of. Also I wonder if my Watch Dogs stuttering issues may be alleviated by having HT. This is the first time since I bought the CPU that I am doubting my choice of i5 over i7.
To say that older CPUs have no issue maintaining 60fps would be a grave misconception. And 120fps? Targeting a sustained 120fps is a fool's errand, take it from one such qualified fool. It's almost absurd to consider X CPU vs Y CPU for a 120fps target, because all you're looking at is varying degrees of miserable failure. There is a tiny minority of games in which 120fps can be realistically maintained, and then subtract from that the handful of games with engines that malfunction at frame rates that high - you're not left with much. The stagnant CPU industry hasn't helped.
Why not both? *shrug* In order to squeeze even more IPC out of their core, Intel needs to keep making it wider- which means that there is a lot of CPU core going unused most of the time. Hyperthreading is a great way to squeeze more performance out of what is already there.
30% boost from HT, more like 20% these days.
Do you run 4K + 8xSSAA in every game? Because if not, you too are lowering details to get a higher framerate.And I'll qualify my last post by saying that I don't accept 'lowering levels of effects' as a valid strategy for maintaining 120fps. I was taking it for granted that people don't want their games looking like arse as long as it means high frame rates.
I don't think you understand what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that at my settings I'm sure I'd be getting more performance than you if I took a screenshot where you did.what does AA have to do with what I was saying? I said it drops below 60 fps with a 2500k and that is FACT. so your logic as usual is that I should turn up the AA until I am gpu limited instead of cpu limited? who cares in this particular case as the point is that a stock 2500k itself does not have the ability to keep the framerate from low 50s or even high 40s. most people buy a high end gpu to stay above 60 fps and you cant do that in the old Crysis which again was the point here.
Has almost nothing to do with cores and HT and almost everything to do with optimization and the nature of the problem being solved in code.
Really? Unreasonable? Crippling? Are those facts or your opinion?Oh come on, there's a difference between degrading draw distances, physics and other effects, and merely not running the game at unreasonably high resolutions with crippling levels of AA.
What AA are you using in the game?I wouldn't argue with that, but what's your point?
You're running settings outside of your spec and complaining that things are too slow. That's not PC gaming, that's foolish.I could just as easily say "turning all settings up to 11 is one of the things that makes up PC gaming.
By "max detail" I take it you mean "only the settings I care about". That's actually not max detail.If you're not going play at max detail, you may as well just buy a console", we'd both be engaging in hyperbole. And while I agree that tweaking is part of the PC experience, I prefer to tweak to the enhancement of IQ, not to it's detriment.
You have that backwards - very high objects have a disproportionately dramatic impact on performance while the difference in IQ is negligible, unlike SSAA which reduces the shimmerfest the game produces over the entire scene, hence providing a massive improvement in IQ.As for reducing CPU intensive settings, as even BD2003 admitted, these are generally scarce (I was trying to play BF3 on a q9650 with my GTX 780 a while ago and there was less than 5fps difference between all settings max vs min because they simply had ah heck all effect on CPU load), and when you do find them, they tend to have a disproportionately dramatic impact on IQ (for example, 'Objects' in Crysis is one of the CPU dependant settings, and draw distance for objects is one realm where Crysis is really starting to show it's age and can ill afford to have it reduced).
You said it.
And I'll qualify my last post by saying that I don't accept 'lowering levels of effects' as a valid strategy for maintaining 120fps. I was taking it for granted that people don't want their games looking like arse as long as it means high frame rates.
I have the same CPU at 4.8Ghz and same mobo and my reading of this thread is making me think the opposite. I can't deny I have those frame rate drops in Crysis 3 that are being spoken of. Also I wonder if my Watch Dogs stuttering issues may be alleviated by having HT. This is the first time since I bought the CPU that I am doubting my choice of i5 over i7.
The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to suspect that it is indeed a fact that 4K + full scene 8xSSAA is impossible on any currently available consumer GPU solution at playable framerates.
The problem is that you're trying to use this completely open-ended criteria. There's practically no limit to the resolution one can use, or the amount of AA one can pile on to a game. The equivalent would be if I expanded my criteria to include all potential .ini modifications etc. You can't tell me, with a straight face, that playing a game with 4K + 8xSSAA is as realistic a proposition as playing a game with all it's in-game detail* settings configured to their maximum values
I think I had settled on 4xSGSSAA. I spend hours testing various AA schemes before I gave up on my first Haswell system (courtesy of Asus' z87 RTC bug), and now I'll have to do it all over again because I neglected to document the outcome.
I don't suppose you've had any success with SGSSAA in DX10? As I remember it, I was having difficulty with blur, and looking through my my screenshots, all the ones with SGSSAA were taken in DX9.
*When I say 'details', I mean standard finite menu options like draw distances, physics, etc, excluding the potentially infinite realm of resolution and filtering. Sorry if this wasn't clear. I wouldn't call something like AA 'detail', as it doesn't add any new detail, but enhances existing detail (not to downplay it's importance). I guess one could argue semantics (eg. higher resolution can resolve finer, and arguably 'more', detail purely by virtue of having more lines) , but I've now outlined my use of the terminology.
I agree that SSAA represents a massive improvement to IQ in transparency-heavy games like Crysis. It's difficult to really appreciate the value of it until you've been playing with it on for a few hours and switch back to the crawling mess that was before.
But I don't agree on the objects being negligible, and I don't know why you choose to compare that setting to SSAA, which is entirely GPU dependant. My last post was clearly relating to CPU dependant settings. You don't 'give up' CPU intensive detail for GPU intensive filtering.
I can definitely sympathise with that. My problem is that I want it both ways, and I guess that dooms me to perpetual discontent.
I also agree with you on the low res testing, but for slightly different reasons.
Watchdogs long stutters are caused by storage reads. The frame rate stutters are caused by GPU VRAM limits. Having 6 real cores and 6 virtual ones does not do anything to alleviate the stutters for me.
HT will improve performance in the game yes, but like BrightCandle said, the stuttering is caused by the game's poor memory handling so that has nothing to do with the CPU.
The game doesn't use enough system ram, and instead goes to storage too much for data..
Yeah, I cant stand the crawlies, TXAA pretty much solves that problem with relatively little performance impact compared to SSAA in the few games that support it. Too bad more don't (thanks NVIDIA!).