I've been running an AMD box for a while now, but with these specs and upcoming next gen games I'm moving back to Intel and a 4770. AMD's cores just don't have the puff and I'd certainly like to run upcoming games with no CPU bottleneck.
6 cores for the game, but the other (2) cores for the system OS, and maybe other functionality. Making 8 core chips still relevant, because a windows gaming machine wants to run the game (6 cores), and still run the OS (ideally at least 1 or 2 cores), to avoid OS activities messing with the highly active 6 core gaming functionality.
I'm hoping that sooner or later, AMD will release future x86 6+ core chips, again.
The current 6 core (or 3M/6C)) FX6300 is quite a sweet spot, giving a very good price point AND respectable performance, at that price point.
But its unlikely to change. Excavator will be 45W and 65W desktop SKUs as well.
I've been running an AMD box for a while now, but with these specs and upcoming next gen games I'm moving back to Intel and a 4770. AMD's cores just don't have the puff and I'd certainly like to run upcoming games with no CPU bottleneck.
What if you don't record video, don't use motion control, and don't share your gameplay/ whatever more you can do on next-gen? Those dedicated cores are wasted idling. It is far better to have all cores utilized all the time, than each core designated to specific task which may, or may not load the core. The same was true for GPUs. Thats why we have unified programmable shaders, and not pixel/vertex shaders.But at least one processor core, dedicated to the non-gaming system OS and other functionality, will allow things (in theory) in run much smoother, as the gaming cores can be 100% left alone, while gaming, and the system OS can compute to its heart content.
I thought the FX6300 was a sweet spot for a low/mid range build also, but now it doesnt even meet the recommended requirements for Watchdogs.
What if you don't record video, don't use motion control, and don't share your gameplay/ whatever more you can do on next-gen? Those dedicated cores are wasted idling. It is far better to have all cores utilized all the time, than each core designated to specific task which may, or may not load the core. The same was true for GPUs. Thats why we have unified programmable shaders, and not pixel/vertex shaders.
On the other hand, there need to be enough available resources that when user decides to use additional OS features, console will not start to choke with increased number of tasks. Because of that games can't rely on 100% of processing power.
The current price of the FX6300 and its respectable multi-threaded performance, make it excellent value for money. But there are a number of options available as regards cpus, and it does not have built in graphics, which is not so good for some buyers.
Maybe they (Sony/Microsoft) want the gaming experience to remain the same, regardless of what is going on in the background.
This is probably best achieved by dedicating some core(s) to the OS and other functions, and the main set of cores for the game.
My point was to emphasize the extremely high system requirements of this game, i.e. that the recommended spec for AMD is an 8 core, which frankly seems rather ridiculous, unless there is something truly remarkable about the graphics or gameplay. To be blunt, it seems like they just did a lazy porting job from slow console cores without utilizing the faster per core performance of desktop cpus. But this is all just speculation, obviously, I am not even a programmer.
I also cant remember any game that didnt have at least some support for dual cores. I think BF4, Crysis3 and FC3 all have a dual core meeting the min specs. I am all for utilizing more threads, but it also seems they could scale the game to be playable on a wider variety of systems.
My point was to emphasize the extremely high system requirements of this game, i.e. that the recommended spec for AMD is an 8 core, which frankly seems rather ridiculous, unless there is something truly remarkable about the graphics or gameplay. To be blunt, it seems like they just did a lazy porting job from slow console cores without utilizing the faster per core performance of desktop cpus. But this is all just speculation, obviously, I am not even a programmer.
I also cant remember any game that didnt have at least some support for dual cores. I think BF4, Crysis3 and FC3 all have a dual core meeting the min specs. I am all for utilizing more threads, but it also seems they could scale the game to be playable on a wider variety of systems.
Things can change you know. Products move in and out of scope, time plans shift, etc.
So if AMD intentionally are pushing 8-core CPUs via the PS4/XBONE consoles in order to pave the way for 8-core desktop CPUs, can we also expect them to release any Steamroller or Excavator based 8-core CPUs going forward?
Otherwise what's the point of pushing 8-core CPUs, if they do not intend to "reap the benefits" of that in the desktop space anyway?
A large chunk of the software, may be relatively out of the control of the company developing the game.
I don't know specifically for this game, but some of the games (especially smaller game companies), buy the rights to use "game engines", and the game engine may be dictating some/all of the high specification requirements.
Also once they have created the large game software, written in some specific way, for a specific gaming environment, such as the xbox 360, it can be an impractically daunting task to drastically change the way the game software utilizes the available cores/threads/resources.
From what I have heard, games can be developed with very tight time-scales, and with limited budgets (since future sales are NOT guaranteed, and they want to minimise the risk of making a loss). Hence there may not be the time and/or resources to drastically change/update/improve/optimize the software.
Take GTA5 as an example, it was given a very long development time (I heard 5 years), and a massive budget, and yet there have been the odd glitch here and there, after its release, such as disappearing cars from garages, and video/game issues if the game is fully installed on an xbox 360 (apparently, not installing the 'play' disc solves the problem and/or using a USB stick or something).
It is just that everyone is saying how much "progress" it is to have high multithreading. And one would think that is true. But if it takes the absolute highest CPU from AMD (not counting the niche 9xxx series) and the highest mainstream CPU from Intel just to meet "recommended" specs, not sure how that is "progress" except for the those that have a ton of money to dump into their system. I thought the idea behind multithreading was to make games more playable (like they are claiming for Planetside 2), not to make the vast majority of systems insufficient to meet "recommended"specs. If one takes the "recommended" specs strictly, I would say that maybe 20% or less of the current gamers have a system that meets them.
I guess we will have to see if the quality of the game is sufficient to justify such high demands.
Mantle a expencional AMD-only API that its excellent at lowering CPU usage that will be added after BF4 release, that ring a bell of what may be happening here?
What's all the fuss about watch dogs. If there developers want to make it exclusive to extreme gamer configuration then so be it.
It's time to show those suc***s that they can't dictate there terms and conditions like that on consumers. If they are not interested to sell there game to us then so be it.
The best answer for these kind of people is to not buy the game at all. Rather then bowing before them in submission. If we don't break this trend now then, consumers are going to loose big time. Even if 1-2 elite consumers would buy that game and manage to run it all of us would loose.
Don't be a fool. Unlike they don't like money they want to sell as many copies to consumers as possible, especially those on so-so hardware. The so-called ultra settings is for those VCG subforum e-peen stroking GTX Titan SLI users that want a heavy performance penalty for the sake of having a heavy performance penalty with little GFX IQ impact compared to the next notch down.
That is true about "ultra", but like I said earlier, even the "recommended" specs are so high that only a small percentage of gamers will meet them.
Watch Dogs dev tweeted those specs are fake. Real specs will come out soon and they will be lower.
Don't be a fool. Unlike they don't like money they want to sell as many copies to consumers as possible, especially those on so-so hardware. The so-called ultra settings is for those VCG subforum e-peen stroking GTX Titan SLI users that want a heavy performance penalty for the sake of having a heavy performance penalty with little GFX IQ impact compared to the next notch down.
if these kind of developers are not shown there position then we will loose.
Games are mainly INT based. Else AMDs FX line would run even slower.