Homeworld Remastered - FX gets hammered

[escrow4]

GameGPU doesn't correlate (testing DX?):

If you still think is a good choice in a CPU heavy title . . . . . D:

 

[ninaholic37]

Ha! Who needs "Homeworld Remastered" when Space Invaders is just as fun and can run on an Atari 2600.

 

[ShintaiDK]

FX keeps doing worse and worse as time goes. No wonder AMD left the desktop with Carrizo.

 

[Jovec]

If you still think is a good choice in a CPU heavy title . . . . . D:

In defense of your position I believe that reality (i.e the FPS) of the CPU situation is what matters, not theory-crafting, compiler/code bias, or lack of optimization. However...

Something is wrong (with the game code) when an 3.0GHz 8-core HW-E leads the charts over a 3.6GHz 6-core HW-E (suggesting the game likes a combination of high IPC and multiple threads) but a 2 core Pentium beats a 8350. The 3GHz Pentium may still have the single thread advantage due to IPC over the 4GHz 8350, but not enough to counter the 2 vs 8 thread difference.

 

[BigDaveX]

Possibly the game really benefits from the larger caches on LGA2011 chips? If it was all about single-thread performance, you'd expect the Phenom II to be beating up on the lower-end FX chips, but it isn't.

 

[Headfoot]

I'd have to guess its the caches. Nothing else makes much sense

 

[Sweepr]

Ouch, looks like the shiny DX12 tech demos won't change reality, per core performance matters a lot for games, some more than others. You can't hide poor single-thread performance with more cores everywhere.

 

[Jovec]

I'd have to guess its the caches. Nothing else makes much sense

Maybe, but +2MB L3 and +4 threads on the 4770k doesn't net much over the 4690k. Or 2MB L3 on the 1820 Celeron vs 8MB L3 on the 8370E (the extra 6MB should matter more than the different cache designs).

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Is there some extra instruction set or feature Haswell has that FX doesn't?

Comparing the FX-4320 to the 8370 in the first graph, it looks like it's scaling with clockspeed only, whereas comparing the i7s to the i3s make it very clear that CPU load is multithreaded.

Without CPU utilization graphs from an FX system, I'm just guessing, but it honestly looks like the game engine isn't spawning threads correctly on AMD hardware - maybe it's setting core affinity wrong or something.

If that's the case, I'd expect a patch to fix FX multithreaded performance very, very soon.

 

[ninaholic37]

It looks like this game doesn't benefit much from anything over 2 cores.

 

[ShintaiDK]

I'd have to guess its the caches. Nothing else makes much sense

Yep and it is. 20MB fast cache matters. Also the turbo is 3.5Ghz.

 

[BigDaveX]

Is there some extra instruction set or feature Haswell has that FX doesn't?

AVX2, but it's highly unlikely that the game uses it, especially since a bit of Googling indicates that the game isn't a total remake with an all-new game engine, and has a lot of underlying code from the original game.

That being the case, I wonder if the FXes are being tripped up by a lot of unoptimized code, since they typically do badly in that regard. Although that brings us back to why the Phenom IIs are still slower than the FX, since IIRC the Phenom II copes far better with older code than its successor does.

 

[Piroko]

Weird. I didn't blindly dial all settings to their max but it seems to run fine on anything that is barely faster than a mashed potato. I can relate to GameGPUs fps findings (well into the hundreds with a fast PC) much more than to Techspots.

 

[escrow4]

In defense of your position I believe that reality (i.e the FPS) of the CPU situation is what matters, not theory-crafting, compiler/code bias, or lack of optimization. However...

Something is wrong (with the game code) when an 3.0GHz 8-core HW-E leads the charts over a 3.6GHz 6-core HW-E (suggesting the game likes a combination of high IPC and multiple threads) but a 2 core Pentium beats a 8350. The 3GHz Pentium may still have the single thread advantage due to IPC over the 4GHz 8350, but not enough to counter the 2 vs 8 thread difference.

Its probably bits of old code combined with single threaded prowess that trips up FX but Intel shines as usual. Point is FX hasn't gotten better. It isn't "future-proof".

EDIT: Techspot is testing OpenGL.

 

[Shivansps]

its probably a ST game...

 

[sandorski]

Not really the type of game where Framerate matters much.

 

[Fjodor2001]

FX keeps doing worse and worse as time goes. No wonder AMD left the desktop with Carrizo.

You mean like Intel left the desktop with Broadwell?

 

[frozentundra123456]

FX keeps doing worse and worse as time goes. No wonder AMD left the desktop with Carrizo.

Well, AMD looks really bad in the open GL benchmarks, but pretty much any cpu is more than adequate in DX according to the game.gpu benchmarks.

Why would anyone want to run open GL for this game, considering the lousy performance? For Linux maybe?

 

[antihelten]

Guys, we're talking about a game running on a 12-year old engine, remastered by the same people who brought us Aliens: Colonial Marines.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Ouch, looks like the shiny DX12 tech demos won't change reality, per core performance matters a lot for games, some more than others. You can't hide poor single-thread performance with more cores everywhere.

What does DX12 have to do with this benchmark? The FX looks "bad" in OpenGL 3.3 mode. Everything runs like greased lightning in (presumably) DX11.

I don't think Homeworld Remastered is available on Linux yet, but if it ever gets ported, then yeah people will be using OpenGL. Maybe if they do a port, they'll take more time to improve the OpenGL performance. That delta is uncharacteristically large.

 

[monstercameron]

Guys, we're talking about a game running on a 12-year old engine, remastered by the same people who brought us Aliens: Colonial Marines.

but a:cm was an excellent game /sarc
just waiting for vulcan/d3d12 games...

 

[Phynaz]

but a:cm was an excellent game /sarc
just waiting for vulcan/d3d12 games...

That's the AMD mantra...just wait and things will be better later. The problem is later never arrives.

 

[Techhog]

You mean like Intel left the desktop with Broadwell?

Don't feed the cat. He's had his fill.

 

[SPBHM]

hopefully this situation is not going to happen in the near future with the new APIs, with lower overhead and better threading

it's kind of sad to see the 8 core 5GHz 220W beast being beaten by the little 50w 3.4GHz dual core, even considering that the game only cares about 2 cores it's still bad to see a 3.4GHz CPU ahead of a 4.7-5GHz one, but it's nothing new that the Intel chips offer a way better balanced CPU for most DX11 games.

 

[ShintaiDK]

but a:cm was an excellent game /sarc
just waiting for vulcan/d3d12 games...

And before that console games, DX11 games, OS patches, new coded games etc.

Its the same excuse, same likely outcome.