IGP: IVB vs. Trinity

[Nemesis 1]

Nemesis uses Larrabee to make his predictions.

Hay now lets not be giving classified info away.

 

[Tuna-Fish]

Not sure why you are dismissing AMD here -- SNB's CPU performance is not better enough than Llano/Trinity's to warrant taking the abysmal GPU performance. AMD's IGP is, what? 2x as fast as HD 3000? 3x?

Depends on the game. He said he likes the strategy games from paradox interactive (HoI3, Magna Mundi), and these are very cpu-heavy, essentially single-threaded, stress the caches/memory subsystem a lot, and at the late stages are slow even with fastest SNB chips out there right now. Trinity or pretty much any other AMD chip would essentially have half the performance of a good Intel chip, and it would really hurt him.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Depends on the game. He said he likes the strategy games from paradox interactive (HoI3, Magna Mundi), and these are very cpu-heavy, essentially single-threaded, stress the caches/memory subsystem a lot, and at the late stages are slow even with fastest SNB chips out there right now. Trinity or pretty much any other AMD chip would essentially have half the performance of a good Intel chip, and it would really hurt him.

Hm. I suppose.

 

[Kristijonas]

They are not single-threaded, I think. Not the latest games anyway.

 

[Riek]

Depends on the game. He said he likes the strategy games from paradox interactive (HoI3, Magna Mundi), and these are very cpu-heavy, essentially single-threaded, stress the caches/memory subsystem a lot, and at the late stages are slow even with fastest SNB chips out there right now. Trinity or pretty much any other AMD chip would essentially have half the performance of a good Intel chip, and it would really hurt him.

Don't forget that his choice is not in the 200$ range but more in the 100$ range.

So atm that would be the i3 2100. As long as intel doesn't put a turbo on it and pushes the frequency above 3.4GHz i think trinity would fare pretty ok against it. (currently the 2500 and later/higher will turboboost to >3.7GHz). but even the original BD with a 900MHz clockadvantage shouldn't be significantly slower in some worse case situations.

 

[ilkhan]

I disagree. I'm not going to play Battlefield 3 and even intel HD2000 is almost enough for my games (The only games I can't play with it is DX:HR, Skyrim, and Witcher 2). Intels new IGP can be quite enough to play these in low-medium on 40fps ( I hope ).

Mobile sandy can play Skyrim, its just not very pretty or fast.

 

[Arkadrel]

A stock Llano w/ IGP can do 1280x1024 High settings, 4xAA, 4xAF, and give very playable fps rates.

Youtube is your friend (there are videos with it)

I like the idea of haveing a IGP, thats actually usefull for gameing, however even with the positive surprise that Llano was (IGPs still are to slow to do anything but really low resolution gameplay).

 

[Tuna-Fish]

They are not single-threaded, I think. Not the latest games anyway.

They run multiple threads, but the game speed is usually limited by one very heavy thread.

The design of the Clausewitz game engine, that all their games since EU3 are based on, started at the worst possible moment just before it became clear that multi-core was the future. Taking a heavily object-oriented, single threaded game engine like it and turning it properly multi-threaded is essentially impossible. You need to bake it into the way you organize all you data when you start the design process for it to work.

They have later added some multi-threaded parts where it can be made to work -- for example I think the HoI3 supply system runs in it's own thread. But the vast majority of all sim code is single-threaded.