GTA V CPU benches - AMD gets hammered (again)

[frozentundra123456]

Looks gpu bound, surprisingly, with the intel processors. Game.gpu got almost 10% faster with 4770k vs 4670k.

 

[Maestro1337]

How would old CPUs like lynnfield i5s ( i5 750 ), i7s ( 860 ) or bloomfields i7 920 do on this test?

 

[lord_emperor]

Source.

Looks like it doesn't like HT much. Not the first time though. Too bad they didn't throw in 5820K for a test.

This test is more consistent with my own experiences. Get 60fps most of the time, might get less but still playable fps with multiple things exploding on-screen. Very high or Ultra settings.

FX-8310 @ 4.2GHz no turbo / 4.0 GHz with 4.8GHz turbo
Asus DirectCu II R9 290 @ Stock
16GB 1600 9-9-9-24

 

[Dave2150]

This test is more consistent with my own experiences. Get 60fps most of the time, might get less but still playable fps with multiple things exploding on-screen. Very high or Ultra settings.

FX-8310 @ 4.2GHz no turbo / 4.0 GHz with 4.8GHz turbo
Asus DirectCu II R9 290 @ Stock
16GB 1600 9-9-9-24

That graph is using a TitanX. Your 290 won't produce similar FPS, so I assume your graphics settings are turned way down.

 

[RussianSensation]

This is probably down to your age.

Gaming on a 1080P on a huge screen would yield such low pixel density and lower imagine quality, most gamers would hate it.

Though for those with ageing eyes I can see how it may look great.

Also, if you're unable to distinguish the vastly superior imagine quality a 4K monitor offers over a 1080P monitor, then your eyes are definitely failing you.

1440P and above (including 4K) are all solid upgrades for gamers, if they have the GPU horsepower required to adequately drive a high FPS at these resolutions.

Who said anything about gaming on a 55" OLED 1.5 feet away from your face? My point is I would take gaming 6-8 feet away on a 55" OLED over gaming 1 foot away on a tiny 27" 2560x1440 monitor. My eyesight is 20/20 and I am not old btw. We all have our preferences but in your post you missed the point that resolution itself is meaningless without considering how far away from the monitor a gamer sits. For example, the PPI on an IMAX screen is far worse than a 4K 24" monitor but the IQ and immersion blows that 4K monitor into outer space. My next upgrade will most likely be a 4K monitor but I am aiming for 32-40" in size.

I am not denying that GTA V looks great at higher resolutions - i.e., 6K. However, there is far more to IQ than resolution. All LCD/LED technology has inherent limitations compared to OLED or even Plasma. When I am playing a game, I will notice accurate colours, perfect blacks, bright whites, great viewing angles, etc. You can't ignore those things when you keep hyping up LCDs. Obviously if you are sitting 2 feet away from a 55" 1080P display, it won't look great playing games.

There is also the immersion factor and why people watch sports, movies and media on a larger screen. I personally cannot stand small objects on a tiny screen. It makes me think I am still 7 years old playing NES in Soviet Russia. I don't like small-sized PC monitors for gaming or media, it doesn't matter to me if it's 4K or 8K or 16K. Ideally my next upgrade will be at least a 37" 4K monitor but chances are I might have to settle for 32 at the slow pace of progress, but I wouldn't buy a 4K 24" monitor for even $200. I might even consider making an HTPC gaming rig and just going all out and getting a 4K 55-60" TV, but lack of FreeSync/GSync on TVs is why this option is probably not going to happen in the next 3-4 years unless someone like Phillips specifically makes a FreeSync/GSync large-sized monitor for gaming to cater to this market.

Also, instead of attacking my eyesight you might want to think outside the box. For example, let's take a Titan X and crank DSR on a 1080P monitor. There are going to be some gamers who prefer this type of gaming over 2560x1440/1600 with conventional or minimal AA. You shouldn't just state that 1080P is "peasant" PC gaming resolution as it's easily the most popular gaming resolution even for people with 670/680/770 SLI or 970/980 SLI. No one really disputes that 4K gaming is wonderful but today it's not that easy to pull off a 4K gaming rig without a serious investment into GPU hardware. We are probably 3-4 years away before forums like ours start adopting 4K on a wider scale given the cost of 4K monitors, slow adoptions of GSync/FreeSync for 4K and most importantly the GPU hardware necessary to drive that many pixels.

I can see how some can live with lower quality settings for a fraction of the price

Thanks for that comparison. Very good post and shows that some games such as GTA V don't improve IQ much when moving from Normal to Very High.

How would old CPUs like lynnfield i5s ( i5 750 ), i7s ( 860 ) or bloomfields i7 920 do on this test?

I would bet if they are overclocked to 3.8-4.2Ghz, the system will be more GPU bottlenecked unless you have a Titan X or similar.

Looks like it doesn't like HT much. Not the first time though. Too bad they didn't throw in 5820K for a test.

One test isn't sufficient. Digital Foundry has some videos where i7 and specifically i7 5960X really pulls away from an i5 in certain scenes. Granted, the i5 is easily playable as we are talking 60 fps vs. 80 fps.

 

[skipsneeky2]

I'm sorry, what? haha, I mean, are you trying to say these guys are relevant?

Reviews could simply note which settings 1gb can handle,recommend the lowest end card that can handle those settings then simply suggest a upgrade cause it looks dreadful on minimum. They don't even need to put in performance numbers for 1gb if they don't want too.

The game runs perfectly fine on a 1gb 650,it looks like crap but plays fine.Not the hardcore looking game like it is on my 970 at 1080p on ultra. Me myself i honestly couldn't spend the $60 on the game and be locked in at minimum on a 1gb gpu.

 

[Ramses]

http://www.overclock.net/t/1534128/vishera-vs-devils-canyon-a-casual-comparison-by-an-average-user/300#post_23941304

not very hammerly looking from our intrepid bencher there.

 

[superstition]

Who said anything about gaming on a 55" OLED 1.5 feet away from your face?

tftcentral ran an informative article about this called Visual Acuity. I highly recommend that everyone read it.

Instead of worrying about important things like static contrast ratio and color gamut, gamers are obsessing over pixels that are too tiny to see because manufacturers decided that was the direction they wanted to go in (because moving from 1080 to 4K is easy from a manufacturing standpoint).

This also has the consequence of making life easier for tech companies selling other products related to people trying to game at 4K and higher. Faster, more expensive, gear...

1080 isn't enough for human vision. 1080 really shouldn't have existed. There should have been a transition from 720 to 1440 and that's where things should have stopped for HDTV. Then the focus should have been on other things, like reducing input lag. HDTVs tend to have terrible levels of input lag. Wide gamut should also be a big deal, since GB-LED backlighting is available — instead of 4K which is clearly overkill unless you like to sit really close to a large screen.

As tftcentral's writer says, 4K makes some sense for computer monitors but it's overkill for TV. That goes for TV-based gaming, due to the size of the panels. Instead of being able to have richer detail, games have been tuned to have less so people can chase 4K resolution. Instead of having wide gamut color, people are worried about 4K pixel count. Instead of worrying about better contrast ratio, people are worried about pixel count.

Manufacturers are already salivating over the prospect of duping people into spending even more on 8K. Apple is unsurprisingly leading the way with its 5K iMac, but other companies have already started talking about 8K. It's time for the enthusiast community to wise up.

These should be the priorities for gamers:

1) low input lag — ironically the top priority for many types of games even though HDTVs and many high-resolution panels have very high levels of it

2) high contrast ratio

3) wide gamut color (the human eye can see a lot more than sRGB)

4) 1440 resolution with large panel sizes, let 1080 die

5) higher levels of detail in games at playable speeds

6) more interesting games — less obsession with graphics and more obsession over game quality — especially game diversity (e.g. I have no interest at all in FPS games — where are complex life simulation games instead of EA garbage like The Sims? Sorry, but shooting people in fancy environments just doesn't interest me. I have better things to do with my time than be a serial killer. And, even if FPS is your thing, game quality is about a lot more than how pretty the environment is that you're shooting people in, isn't it?)

7) pixel clarity/speed (i.e. strobing backlights, faster refresh rates, faster pixels, minimal overshoot)

8) quiet high-performance systems (putting on headphones to mask noise doesn't work very well, nor is it good for your hearing)

9) something I forgot to mention because I'm old...

4K is pretty much only necessary for scientific imaging or some sort of up close work with lots of data (spreadsheets?, high frequency trading?). It's particularly ridiculous to cram that many pixels into a 27" panel and think that that's an improvement. It's not. It's a drawback because you're going to have to spend more money to push those pixels you can't appreciate because they're too small for human vision — and more than likely have to reduce detail and/or framerate.

A great example of the insanity is an article that talked about wonderful 8K "painted on" gaming imagery. The article posted screenshots (not clickable full-res pix either) while it gushed about how beautiful everything was. Apparently, those images were supposed to show us, on our normal resolution monitors, just how much we need ultra-high resolution screens. Maybe it was just 5K or 6K or something? In any case, the point is that the author didn't even realize that he was trying to sell us on the necessity of very high-resolution panels while having us use our normal monitors to look at images that allegedly required very high-resolution pixel counts to appreciate. The reality is that high-quality settings can be appreciated at normal pixel counts. Games can have more detail at resolutions more practical for human visual acuity with playable framerates — if gamers will start to think rationally about their priorities.

Games can also have more depth if people start focusing more on gameplay and less on pretty environments in which to commit their slaughter. It's always easier for a developer to tack on prettier graphics than it is for them to make deep and compelling gameplay.

 

[superstition]

Back to topic. The only hammering I see is pentium having its ass handed to it. 4,5GHz 2 core haswell is in average hardly any faster than stock fx6350, but the 11fps minimum is disastrous.

And we talk about CPU people loosed their sh1t about, taunted as second coming of Buddha.

I bet intel made moremoney on these unlocked pentiums than amd on all their apu+cpu combined.

You can't imagine how much I've been trolled on slickdeals.net for cautioning people about spending money on that gimmick. I warned them that the days of the E2140 are not exactly still with us but got mostly hysterical flack in return.

Having two pro review sites (Eurogamer and another site I can't remember the name of that flatly stated they would not recommend the Pentium for a general gaming PC) back me up, and citing specific reasons from their articles wasn't enough, either.

Just recently I was told that I tried to "defame" the processor which is "spectacular", among other things.

The Pentium is a great chip for certain niche uses, like an emulation box or a "casual" gaming box (e.g. a Sims and MMO machine). For minimally-threaded gaming clockspeed can be very helpful. Girls who want to play The Sims 3 and guys who want to play SWTOR can get by fine with it. But, for an enthusiast gaming PC it's just a ruse to get people to spend more money replacing it once the thrill of overclocking is displaced by the reality of stutter.

 

[superstition]

As for this topic's original thrust... I think it's pretty interesting that a second-rate server chip has managed to remain viable as a gaming CPU for so long.

No one needs 8 cores or 8 threads for gaming until games become super complex with advanced AI and such. We're nowhere near that territory yet.

I say second-rate because AMD is a much poorer company than Intel and just can't compete with Intel's process node advantage and other advantages — not to knock AMD. The company should be applauded for competing at all, especially given Intel's history of dirty tricks such as bullying OEMs into not stocking AMD systems, sabotaging AMD's chips with its compilers, getting influential benchmarks to be flawed in favor of their chips, etc.

And, while AMD's FX chips have never been the darling of the server world, having 8 quasi cores with slow performance per core is a server and/or workstation thing, not a typical desktop user/gamer thing — especially with earlier versions of Windows and DX 9-11.

I spent $59 plus tax on $99 for my 8320E (considering the $40 off for the bundle with the UD3P) which is running at 4.284 GHz at 1.284 volts. It can go to 5 GHz but I have found this is the best setting for performance per watt given my noise tolerance level and the case/cooling setup I have. The chip plus motherboard cost $133.75 with tax. I am mainly using it for h.265 encoding. It seems like money well spent, especially since I was able to recycle DDR3 I had in an older system I decommissioned, the case, and the power supply.

 

[TeknoBug]

Why do you always take the worst perf/price APU ????
A8-7600/7650K is 33% cheaper than 7850K and it can still play the latest games. Hell even the A6-7400K can play the latest games at 720p and it only cost $65.

A8 7600 paired with R7 240 for dual graphics, should get over 30fps. I haven't gotten GTA 5 on PC yet, might try sometimes.

1080P is on the low end peasant side for PC gaming now.

Please tell me you're being serious.

 

[senseamp]

It's all Intel's fault, sabotaging AMD with developers with compilers and stuff. Intel should make its designs open so that AMD can optimize it's CPU cores better. Or developers should remove features on which AMD CPUs perform worse. It will move PC gaming forward and improve competition.

 

[frozentundra123456]

A8 7600 paired with R7 240 for dual graphics, should get over 30fps. I haven't gotten GTA 5 on PC yet, might try sometimes.


Please tell me you're being serious.

I agree, not with the way it was stated, but yes, 1080p is the low end of PC gaming.

 

[jpiniero]

I agree, not with the way it was stated, but yes, 1080p is the low end of PC gaming.

The Latest Steam survey has about 1% of Windows users above 1920x1200 as their primary display resolution. You can pretty much be assured that most people (even the ones who buy high end cards) are running 1080p.

 

[Ramses]

I can't find a good reason for anything beyond 1080p thus far myself.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Let me clarify. I consider 1080p in all games at med settings low end. 1080 p with high to ultra would be medium to high end gaming. Over 1080p is still a niche, but will gradually become more mainstream, especially when 14nm gpus hit the market. On the desktop, i certainly would not buy a build a new system that could not play current demanding games at 1080p. I have a feeling that most of the sub 1080p systems on steam are older systems or especially low resolution laptops.

 

[superstition]

I can't find a good reason for anything beyond 1080p thus far myself.

Note how 4K is higher than any of those, and this is for computer usage which means sitting much much closer to the screen.

This is of course assuming normal visual acuity. If VA = 1.6 the resolution will have to be 60% higher in both horizontal and vertical direction for the display to be considered retina. Especially with young people (under 25 years old) a VA of 1.6 isn’t all that rare. Another thing to keep in mind is that because of the relatively short absolute viewing distance, sitting marginally closer can already have a fairly significant effect. Sitting at 65 cm is already a 7.7% increase in linear resolution compared to 70 cm, at 60 cm that’s 16.7%. Those 4K 27” displays suddenly make a lot more sense.

...

The fun really starts with the Ultra High Definition viewing distance recommendations. The previous part already showed that the SMPTE and THX recommendations have a wide field of view, which results in very large TVs for what most people consider a comfortable viewing distance. But those are still quite narrow though when you compare them with the 60° HFOV of 4K and the insanely wide 100° HFOV of 8K. Using the 250 cm viewing distance example the previous section ended with results in a 130.4” (331.2 cm) screen diagonal for 4K and a 269.2” (683.7 cm) screen diagonal for 8K.

For VA = 1.0 the optimal viewing angle would be 58.37° for 4K and 96.33° for 8K. At those angles the horizontal retina resolution for VA = 1.0 would be 3970 pixels for 4K and 8194 for 8K. If you think about that you only have maximum visual acuity in the foveola, 8K seems quite a waste; you can only see a circle with a 69 pixel diameter with maximum accuracy at the time out of 7680x4320.

Even if you move your focus by moving your eyes or turning your head you still can’t see the maximum detail of resolutions wider than 3438 pixels if your head is straight in the front of the centre of the screen (VA = 1.0). Even for VA=1.6 that’s still only 5500 pixels. For resolutions wider than that you’d really have to move your head sideways to see all the detail.

On computer displays there is definitely something to say for 4K. You can display a lot of information simultaneously and you usually only have to focus on a small area at the time, which means the higher detail really has added value. Furthermore the short viewing distance allows a wide field of view without the need for extremely large displays.

With televisions it’s a different story. Many people probably aren’t even making full use of their FHD TV yet. To really profit from 4K you’d need an extremely large screen, or sit extremely close. And 8K is just plain ridiculous. For a 250 cm viewing distance you’d need a 595 x 335 cm screen.

One of the reasons that 4K televisions sell relatively well might be that in the store people tend to look at it from a very short distance, at which they could easily see that 4K is sharper than FHD. If they would look at it from the same distance as the actual distance they would view it from at home, many would not be able to tell the difference.

And that’s with a comparison with 1080. 1440 would make the comparison moot for people with normal vision. 1080 should have never existed. HDTV should have moved from 720 to 1440 and stopped. Then the focus could have been on more important things, like truly low input lag.

 

[Ramses]

I think I might be uncultured, I was happy with my 1600x1200 Sun 21". Wish they weren't all 20 years old or painfully expensive. I do have a much less heavy duty desk now though.

 

[coercitiv]

Let me clarify. I consider 1080p in all games at med settings low end. 1080 p with high to ultra would be medium to high end gaming.

This is not a reply to your assessment, but rather an OT afterthought. It reminds me of the soda paradigm: extra large, large, medium.

It seems in gaming medium is low, high is medium. ultra is high.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

I can't find a good reason for anything beyond 1080p thus far myself.

Heck, I game most of the time on a 1440x900 monitor...... It looks good enough for me and my lowly GTX 650 TI runs everything silky smooth. It would be nice to game at 4K, but I just think it still costs too much to do so.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I think I might be uncultured, I was happy with my 1600x1200 Sun 21". Wish they weren't all 20 years old or painfully expensive. I do have a much less heavy duty desk now though.

ALL HAIL 4:3 (or 5:4) RESOLUTIONS!

We need a PC Resolution Revolution. Throw off the chains of the HDTV oppressors! We don't need 1080 or 1440 . . . we need 2048x1536!!!! And beyond!

The Resolution Revolution begins here:

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1652

(might need a Fresnel magnifier to actually see anything . . .)

 

[Ramses]

I was drug kicking and screaming into wide-screen. Half the damn sites online still don't make use of it.

 

[USER8000]

Have a second look, the above graph is at 1080p. At 720p they all have more than 30fps.

A video of the A8 7600 running it at 1368X768 on medium settings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJgyEVfUXy0

Another video when running at 1280X720 on medium settings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Bt1fXoStso

The framerates are reasonably smoothly delivered it appears.

In the UK that is a sub £70 CPU and even a Core is close to £90 here. With the A68 motherboards now under £40,and the high speed DDR3 costing the same as slower stuff here,that is basically a £40 graphics card in a sub £70 CPU.

The reason why people are raising the bar on purpose,is since even at low resolution the vast majority of Intel IGPs(outside Iris Pro with L4 cache),cannot even run newish games like GTAV even at 30FPS(or more) at that resolution. So instead of admitting AMD can actually run more modern games,they set the bar high so they can exclude the AMD advantage in this scenario and say the performance of both the IGPs in Intel Core i3 and AMD APUs are realistically the same in their view.

But,expect the narrative to change with the socketed Broadwell Core i5 CPUs with L4 cache. Even these were 5% faster than a cheaper AMD APU for IGP graphics,suddenly expect the Intel "advantage" to be one,and how suddenly it is amazing you can run newish games on them.

Oh wait,didn't that happen when the Haswell Iris Pro chips with L4 cache were announced??

I have a Core i7 and a GTX660TI myself currently,but still was surprised that the Llano and Trinity APU systems I had a muck around wih could run more games than I could expect,and was pleasantly surprised.

I do agree that the higher end APUs are too expensive though. The A10 7850K is not worth its price of around £110. For that money you could get a G3258 or an X4 860K and get a better discrete card for not much more.

 

[Headfoot]

The two tests dont agree very well either, if you look closely. PC Lab is getting almost as fast framerate with a GTX970 as Game.gpu is getting with 980 SLI. Maybe SLI doesnt scale well yet, or the 980s are running out of vram? Or maybe game.gpu is running Ultra or with some other performance sapping setting turned up.

More likely the PClab.pl benches are just outright wrong, since that is literally the least reliable and accurate site out there

 

[AtenRa]

A video of the A8 7600 running it at 1368X768 on medium settings:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJgyEVfUXy0

Now that is nice, a 20W Carrizo with DDR-4 2133MHz will be able to play at NATIVE 1368x768 every game at 30fps or more including newest AAA titles.

Im sure hope someone will produce a cheap 14" 1368x768, iGPU only Carrizo with DDR-4 2133MHz memory.