Which CPU fpr Starcraft 2 and others

[BigChickenJim]

Haswell would just improve on this:

Hmmmm, I think this graph is a little misleading. I have an FX-6300 at stock and two HD 7870s in CFX and I've played SC2 extensively at all ultra settings. I've never, and I mean NEVER seen my FPS drop below 45, and even the few times it's gone down that much have been during massive late-game turtle blob wars between six players. I'm guessing that this was measured during the most CPU-intensive situation they could reliably create, and that situation almost never occurs in normal StarCraft play.

OP, I know it's easy to fall victim to the Intel worship, but I'm speaking from personal experience and can assure you that AMD's performance "in the wild" is nowhere near as dire as all these benchmarks would have you believe. Are Intels better CPUs? Yes, absolutely. But they're also more expensive (sometimes quite a bit more), and if you're playing on a 60Hz monitor those extra 10-12 frames aren't going to make much difference 95% of the time. For me, the choice usually comes down to whether a 10 FPS difference (that I may not even be able to see on my monitor without massive tearing) is worth an extra 50-100 bones to me when I'm already bumping 60 consistently. My answer is usually no.

Just my two cents.

 

[inf64]

Good post BigChickenJim

 

[Sweepr]

Simply put, AMD doesnt offer the kind of single thread performance you need for this game. Sometimes twice the number of cores & twice the die size still arent enough.

 

[SPBHM]

Hmmmm, I think this graph is a little misleading. I have an FX-6300 at stock and two HD 7870s in CFX and I've played SC2 extensively at all ultra settings. I've never, and I mean NEVER seen my FPS drop below 45, and even the few times it's gone down that much have been during massive late-game turtle blob wars between six players. I'm guessing that this was measured during the most CPU-intensive situation they could reliably create, and that situation almost never occurs in normal StarCraft play.

OP, I know it's easy to fall victim to the Intel worship, but I'm speaking from personal experience and can assure you that AMD's performance "in the wild" is nowhere near as dire as all these benchmarks would have you believe. Are Intels better CPUs? Yes, absolutely. But they're also more expensive (sometimes quite a bit more), and if you're playing on a 60Hz monitor those extra 10-12 frames aren't going to make much difference 95% of the time. For me, the choice usually comes down to whether a 10 FPS difference (that I may not even be able to see on my monitor without massive tearing) is worth an extra 50-100 bones to me when I'm already bumping 60 consistently. My answer is usually no.

Just my two cents.

as long as you don't use vsync 60Hz doesn't really mean much,
and if you use vsync a cpu bottleneck can be even worse, if it goes bellow 60.

he described the PII X6 3.7GHz as "painful" in SC2, so I guess AMD made a huge step forward in ST performance for this game and the benchmarks are made using things that are almost possible to happen during normal gameplay.

still, there is no denying, his intention was an 8350, and for this money the i5 is simply faster in this game, your slowdown to 45FPS could have been 60+ with the i5.

 

[Ventanni]

It really depends on what you're doing. The OP plays 2v2 and 3v3 games, which are far more CPU intensive than just 1v1 games. I played 1v1 games on my friend's Phenom II 970 + 550ti and it played just fine. No issues whatsoever. In fact, I didn't even notice a difference between that and my 3770k at home. When you get into 3v3 games though I can see it slowing down a bit. It's not that I think the OP will be unsatisfied with the FX level performance, but if SC2 is his primary game he plays, going the Intel route would likely be a better investment for a little extra money.

Also note that he can go the Intel route and just play off the iGPU until he can afford a better GPU later on down the road. I was able to play SC2 @ 1920x1080 on my HD4000 with the shaders set to minimum, and it was perfectly playable. If he gets a Haswell setup, the 4600 should perform be a bit better even. This is exactly what I would do honestly.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Hmmmm, I think this graph is a little misleading. I have an FX-6300 at stock and two HD 7870s in CFX and I've played SC2 extensively at all ultra settings. I've never, and I mean NEVER seen my FPS drop below 45, and even the few times it's gone down that much have been during massive late-game turtle blob wars between six players. I'm guessing that this was measured during the most CPU-intensive situation they could reliably create, and that situation almost never occurs in normal StarCraft play.

OP, I know it's easy to fall victim to the Intel worship, but I'm speaking from personal experience and can assure you that AMD's performance "in the wild" is nowhere near as dire as all these benchmarks would have you believe. Are Intels better CPUs? Yes, absolutely. But they're also more expensive (sometimes quite a bit more), and if you're playing on a 60Hz monitor those extra 10-12 frames aren't going to make much difference 95% of the time. For me, the choice usually comes down to whether a 10 FPS difference (that I may not even be able to see on my monitor without massive tearing) is worth an extra 50-100 bones to me when I'm already bumping 60 consistently. My answer is usually no.

Just my two cents.

Weird, because my experience is actually the opposite.

I actually experience situations where my fps are lowing than the 64.9 avg they're showing.

I created a benchmark using a custom map that spawns marines to test my i5-2500k way back when.

And of course that's not even worse case, can you make a video showing one of these large late game 3v3 battles with a FPS counter?

 

[BigChickenJim]

as long as you don't use vsync 60Hz doesn't really mean much,
and if you use vsync a cpu bottleneck can be even worse, if it goes bellow 60.

he described the PII X6 3.7GHz as "painful" in SC2, so I guess AMD made a huge step forward in ST performance for this game and the benchmarks are made using things that are almost possible to happen during normal gameplay.

still, there is no denying, his intention was an 8350, and for this money the i5 is simply faster in this game, your slowdown to 45FPS could have been 60+ with the i5.

If you don't use V-Sync then you'll get screen tearing out the wazoo while panning around the map in SC2. I guess that might be ok with some people, but I find it horribly distracting. To be honest, I think that if your equipment can handle 60+ FPS averages in the games you play on a 60Hz display then it doesn't make sense to turn V-Sync off. The extra frames are almost never worth the tearing. V-Sync should only exacerbate a CPU bottleneck if it's actually double V-Sync and locks you down to 30 FPS if you can't reach 60. Otherwise it would have little to no effect.

I don't disagree that Intel makes faster processors; I explicitly stated that in my post. I didn't even say that he shouldn't get an Intel. I just said that I thought the graph that was left hanging out there was a little misleading judging from my personal experiences with AMD and SC2 specifically.

As I've long said, the best processor choice nearly always comes down to individual situations. There is no single right answer all the time. For my current rig, AMD was the right choice. Maybe next time it won't be. The point is that OP will be fine regardless of which way he chooses to go. It doesn't have to be all Intel all the time just because of some skewed benchmarks.

@Balla

Sorry, there won't be any footage forthcoming in the near future. I'm strapped for time these days and lack the patience (and software) to get bogged down in time-consuming benchmarks/comparisons. You'll have to take my word for it. Scary, I know I don't run FRAPs all the time so I suppose it's possible that SC2 has dipped down below 40 on my rig before, but I've certainly never seen it with or without FRAPs (I tend to be pretty sensitive to FPS rates under 40). Hard numbers aside, my point is that in standard SC2 play those huge, frame-murdering battles are extremely, and I mean EXTREMELY uncommon. Most games are won or lost in under 12 minutes. OP will have no issues playing SC2 on an 8350 if that's the route he chooses.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

Unfortunately I can't take your word for it because my own experience with a faster chip showed otherwise

Also this 8350 video in HOTS in 1v1 shows the 8350 even with a mild overclock is still garbage for the title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gn7o2mb31ws

 

[BigChickenJim]

Well, that's your right, sir. I haven't played SC2 for a while, so it is possible that I'm misremembering to some degree. Maybe I should have said something more along these lines: I don't recall ever having any noticeable performance issues on an AMD chip in SC2. Fair compromise?

 

[Makaveli]

It really depends on what you're doing. The OP plays 2v2 and 3v3 games, which are far more CPU intensive than just 1v1 games. I played 1v1 games on my friend's Phenom II 970 + 550ti and it played just fine. No issues whatsoever. In fact, I didn't even notice a difference between that and my 3770k at home. When you get into 3v3 games though I can see it slowing down a bit. It's not that I think the OP will be unsatisfied with the FX level performance, but if SC2 is his primary game he plays, going the Intel route would likely be a better investment for a little extra money.

Also note that he can go the Intel route and just play off the iGPU until he can afford a better GPU later on down the road. I was able to play SC2 @ 1920x1080 on my HD4000 with the shaders set to minimum, and it was perfectly playable. If he gets a Haswell setup, the 4600 should perform be a bit better even. This is exactly what I would do honestly.

Totally agree.

I play alot of 4vs4 maps in SC2 and I see slowdowns on my rig with alot of units in game. As soon as people drop from the map fps goes up.

If this game was coded to use more than 2 cores I don't think this would have been an issue

 

[USER8000]

Funnily enough the best SC2 player I ever met was using a Phenom II X4 965 and an HD6870 and was in the Diamond League at the time. Go figure.

 

[Dice144]

At the ultra/highest setting for everything my 2500k @ 4.4 Ghz with my 7970 almost never had noticeable lag unless I was playing a 4x4 map and everything was attacking at once.

My AMD X6 on the other hand was almost unplayable. The game would actually say it was waiting for players to sync. (dont know exact wording at work)

On 1v1 and 2v2 didn't notice much of an issue with the AMD. I just believe the 2500k smoother gameplay spoiled me.

On another note I play at 2560x1440 and sometimes play music videos or a movie on the second display at the same time.

 

[Concillian]

I just got my new water pump in. I was planning to put it on the AMD system to test if I can finally break the 4ghz without crashing.

I did some winter testing (live in cold buffalo) and the system still would not go stable at 4.1 ghz. However, can use some thermal paste and some free time to try the amd one last time under water before swapping the guts out for my 4770k

For SCII just use 3 cores. Disable the cores that have the biggest issues and you can probably get 4.3 with 3 cores.

 

[Makaveli]

Funnily enough the best SC2 player I ever met was using a Phenom II X4 965 and an HD6870 and was in the Diamond League at the time. Go figure.

i'm not surprised at all.

Having a High end rig doesn't mean you are going to be better than someone with a lesser computer.

Secondly what settings was he playing at on that rig?

People I use to know that played competitively would often have settings turned down and not having anything maxed out even if their system could handle it.

 

[Dice144]

My buddy system is so much slower he knows when the enemy is coming by a huge lag spike beforehand.

Whenever he says lagging in spike we know they are coming.

 

[blackened23]

Yep, most of the Koreans (who play on stream in tournaments) play SC2 with cheesy laptops. They obviously do incredibly well in the highest leagues without having a ton of PC horsepower....

That being said, I know my preference is having a beastly PC. I know i'll never be at that level of play in any game, lol. (not enough time on my hands!)