Will upgrading from Dual core to Quad dramatically improve my gaming???????

[AruisDante]

Wow.... I'm surprised that there's still so much stupid going on here. I'm sorry that I never wound up coming back to clear things up, but unfortunately my internet died and I didn't feel like typing long posts on my iPhone because it takes forever and auto correct pwns computer acronyms.

Ok... first off, HTT speed means, for all intents and purposes, absolutely nothing. That bus is so fast anyway that 200MHz or even 500MHz isn't going to matter. Nothing comes close to saturating it. So, looking at absolute HTT speed (the speed the bus runs at, not the reference speeds that the clocks for the CPU and RAM are based off of) as a measure of anything is pointless. It's not going to have any effect at all.

Secondly, and this is something that's been bothring me in a LOT of threads lately, is this talk about CPU's bottlenecking high end GPU's when they didn't bottleneck a lower end GPU. This logic is, well, completely illogical. CPU's don't handel any graphical processing at all. Increasing graphical detal does not increase load on the CPU (by a measurable amount). Therefore, if a CPU can serve up enough data in a game to push 60FPS, it can push out enough data to push 60FPS. It doesn't matter if it's getting 60FPS on a 7200GS or crossfire 4870x2's. The amount of data that the CPU has to process before the GPU can do its thing is the same. CPU overhead increases SLIGHTLY with SLi/crossfire, but not nearly enough to notice in normal gaming situations.

You have to look at the time it takes to render a frame this way: Tf=Tc+Tg, where Tf= total frame time, Tc= time spend computing CPU tasks, and Tg= time spent computing GPU tasks. To get 60FPS (the max you can see, and the max most monitors can display anyway), Tf has to be less than .0167 seconds. Increasing the speed of the CPU reduces Tc, and increasing the speed of the GPU reduces Tg. So, increasing CPU speed does indeed always reduce Tf. However, in almost all modern games, Tc is MINISCULE compared to Tg in pretty much every situation due to the much smaller amount of data that needs to be processed by the CPU. Let's say for example that we start at 60FPS, and that Tc and Tg reduce linearly and directly proportional to GPU and GPU speeds (not true at all, but it illistrates my point). Let's also assume that in this situation, Tc=10% of Tf, and Tg=90% of Tf.

This means that initial Tc= .00167, and Tg= .015, if we assume that initial Tf=0167. Now, let's increase the GPU and CPU speeds and see what happens to Tf. If we increase the CPU power by 50%, Tc becomes .000833. If we leave the GPU at the same speed, our net Tf is now .0158 or 63FPS. That's a gain of 3FPS for a 50% increase in CPU performance. Now let's increase GPU speed by 50%, and put CPU speed back to the starting speed. Tg becomes .0075, so Tf becomes .0092, or 109FPS. That's a gain of 49FPS for a 50% increase in GPU speed.

Let's recap...

increaseing CPU speed by 50% netted a 3FPS gain, or a 5% increase in FPS over the base value.

increasing GPU speed by 50% netted a 49FPS gain, or an 81% increase in FPS over the base value.


Now, this example has a LOT of assumptions and oversimplifications, but it's actually a pretty acurate model for gaming performance in the majority of games and situations. As you can see, the CPU speed is almost meaningless, as the GPU is by far the limiting factor on the FPS equation.

You see all of these tests these days showing CPU performance in games and the gains between various CPU's. But what do they all ahve in common? They're all run at as low of a resolution and with as few graphical details as possible, because this is the only way to make Tc the limiting factor in the equation and thus see actual, noticable gains between various CPU configurations. Once you actually put the processors into the real world, Tg once again becomes by far the limiting factor in the equation, and so even though your super fast CPU may be 40% better in games than your buddies, it's only 3% better when you play the game because that's all that 40% increase in speed effects the equation by.




Now, on to archectures... yeah, if you're oging to do a CPU comparison, they MUST be of the same architecture. You can't take a quad of one arch and a dual of another, drop out two cores, and directly compare them even if you make the clock speeds the same, because they have different clock per clock performance. And bus speed improvements, such as HTT bus speed increases, are NOT what we mean by architectural improvements, because as I ranted aboev, HTT is already so fast anyway that it doesn't matter. We're talking about the actual time it takes the CPU to process a given instruction, or how many instructions it can process per clock cycle.

[SSPrncVegeta]

Originally Posted by AruisDante

Let's recap...

increaseing CPU speed by 50% netted a 3FPS gain, or a 5% increase in FPS over the base value.

increasing GPU speed by 50% netted a 49FPS gain, or an 81% increase in FPS over the base value.

Agreed. All 10 of my chars.

edit1- People are always afraid their CPU will hold back their GPU. It's not by much, you'd do much better with a top-of-the-line with a slower CPU than a "balanced" GPU and CPU setup. The both of best is optimal, but you're not sacrificing much with a slower cpu.

[Maniac]

Dante, when people say a slower CPU may bottleneck a high-end card setup they do not mean it will be lower performance than if they had a low end card, they mean that their CPU is holding their cards back in that if they had a faster CPU they could get a higher FPS, whereas before they would have been GPU bottlenecked.

But TBH, in games where it matters (ie the fps is below 60 even on SLI/CF setups) it's still gonna be GPU bottlenecked!

I guess if you're worried about being able to get 200 FPS in Quake Wars or something a cpu bottleneck may matter O_o.

So basically I agree with you .

[MrObvious]

It depends on the game. I think mostly everyone who says crap about the CPU limiting the GPU is talking about a dual not being enough for Crysis and getting a frame boost using their 4870, 280, etc. and going to a quad. That's what I've heard before though

[gunbo13]

Originally Posted by MrObvious

It depends on the game. I think mostly everyone who says crap about the CPU limiting the GPU is talking about a dual not being enough for Crysis and getting a frame boost using their 4870, 280, etc. and going to a quad. That's what I've heard before though

Crysis is not quad-optimized.

[MrObvious]

Then how come I've heard people say that it gets better frames upgrading from a dual to a quad? I didn't read that whole you vs. Shrimp thread because it was long.

(A summary would work.)

[ShrimpBrime]

Originally Posted by TheDayWalker

Shrimpy you were right initial benching shows exactly the same virtual mark (13200 lol) scores as my old athlon and the phenom is running stock speeds cant wait to see what she`s capable of if i get up to 3ghz++++++++ also on a gaming note she renders a hell of a lot smoother than my old ath, so now we all know the answers yes it will improve my gaming experience........................................ ................................

This is why an AMD quad is better than a dual. His new quad gets the same scores as his 3.5 ghz dual with virtualmark, and the Phenom was Not OCed. Also as stated above the Phenom renders smoother. Real simple. He won't be putting the AMD dual core back in his machine. In fact I don't know why any person would buy a quad and go back to a dual even if the dual is 45 nm. Just plain kills the possible multi tasking that can be done.....

[gunbo13]

Originally Posted by MrObvious

Then how come I've heard people say that it gets better frames upgrading from a dual to a quad?

They are full of **** basically.

[ShrimpBrime]

Originally Posted by gunbo13

They are full of **** basically.

And so are those who think duals are better than quads......I still havent seen a dual get better benchmarks.

[MrObvious]

I have in the non quad optimized benchmarks because a dual usually overclocks better than it's quad counterpart because of the less chance of a core being unstable at a high speed. For example the K8 chips can hit 3.5 GHz while K10 quads are hitting 3.2 or so only.

[Tacoboy]

I would say to hold off, AMD will be releasing 45nm quad cores in the first quarter 2009

[ShrimpBrime]

I would never go back to a dual even if it is 300 mhz faster with OC.

I refer to AMD processors.

The performance gains in today's games usually come from the video cards, BUT I can render on 2 cores and play Crysis on the Other 2 and never see the difference. All the while running native 1067 Ram and HT @ 2k mhz.

Also I'd like to mention that through all the AMD processors I've owned, I actually favored my FX-55 out of all of them until I got this Phenom. All my dual cores where fast and all but the lack of tweeky ness just did not turn me on. I'm sure my opinion would be different if I had a FX-60 or Athlon BE. But my benchmark scores would still be lower any way.....

[Maniac]

Originally Posted by ShrimpBrime

I would never go back to a dual even if it is 300 mhz faster with OC.

I refer to AMD processors.

The performance gains in today's games usually come from the video cards, BUT I can render on 2 cores and play Crysis on the Other 2 and never see the difference. All the while running native 1067 Ram and HT @ 2k mhz.

Also I'd like to mention that through all the AMD processors I've owned, I actually favored my FX-55 out of all of them until I got this Phenom. All my dual cores where fast and all but the lack of tweeky ness just did not turn me on. I'm sure my opinion would be different if I had a FX-60 or Athlon BE. But my benchmark scores would still be lower any way.....

When will you understand that the majority of people who game are, guess what, just gaming - and aren't doing anything else in the background. Most of us here shut off all unnecessary programs when we go to game.

[SSPrncVegeta]

The only intensive programs I can think of someone using while gaming is folding. I turn off my SMP clients because I use VMware and it sucks up resources, and I turn off my GPU client because it'll cause my system to hang. If I didn't fold I'd rather have a duo that clocked higher. I'm limited in my quad's clock speed because one core is 12c higher than the other cores and it's not like there's a large selection of quad optimized games to take advantage of the two extra cores.

[jasonelmore]

All i know is i'll never go dual again.. Quad Rules.. Crysis really likes the other 2 cores also.. especially if you dont have a nice sound card and your cpu has to do the work. I'm editing a Farcry 2 Map, Watching a BlueRay Movie, Running a Virus Scan and have several other programs up and running such as office and multiple web browser windows open.. and my CPU usage is 20% across all 4 cores.. i could'nt do that with my dual core..

[SSPrncVegeta]

Bluray movies? Virus scanning? Several other programs such as office and multiple web browsers open? Take me into your arms you studly geek!

Bluray - Hardware accelerated by PureVideo, reducing CPU usage to 1-2%.
Virus scanning - 1-2% usage, but your hard drive is going singlecore while loading your Crysis editor
Office and multiple windows - Zero cpu time.

95% of that 20% is coming from Crysis. Allow me to let you in on something. If you're using under 20% of a quad, that means you're using less than the potential of a single core. It's when you go above 25% that a quad becomes better than a single, and 50% for a quad to overcome a dual. I've seen Far Cry 2 use up as much as 60%! Zomg! But that's while loading a map. Otherwise it's ~25%.

In a few years you'll be lactating over your octocore and tell forum newbies none of the stuff you're doing now was possible with that octocore.

[jasonelmore]

Originally Posted by SSPrncVegeta

Bluray movies? Virus scanning? Several other programs such as office and multiple web browsers open? Take me into your arms you studly geek!

Bluray - Hardware accelerated by PureVideo, reducing CPU usage to 1-2%.

The CPU has to push the GPU in order to accelerate PureVideo.. Why do you think people dont fold with all 4 cores and leave the GPU by it'self..
I was'nt telling anyone what to do.. but all i know is when i had a E8400 things went a lot slower

and did i mention i was folding on 1 core when i wrote all that stuff.. still ~20%

[Maniac]

Originally Posted by SSPrncVegeta

95% of that 20% is coming from Crysis. Allow me to let you in on something. If you're using under 20% of a quad, that means you're using less than the potential of a single core. It's when you go above 25% that a quad becomes better than a single, and 50% for a quad to overcome a dual. I've seen Far Cry 2 use up as much as 60%! Zomg! But that's while loading a map. Otherwise it's ~25%.

He wasn't playing Crysis in that list .

But anyway, 20% under a quad is not necessarily going to use only 80% on a single - on a non hyper-threaded single core there is always the possibility of wasted resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading

[SSPrncVegeta]

I used 80% as an example that the cpu resources needed to do the stuff he's doing is capable of being done on a singlecore. I ran some benchmarks to show this. FC2 averages around 30% cpu usage, which means a single can't do the job but a dual can do as well as a quad in this case. I ran the benchmark three times, one with the process set to one affinity, one for two and one for all four. I got within 0.1fps of the dual and quad at 49fps; The single scrapped along at 23fps.

Work that utilizes 20% on a quad isn't going to be core-impared on a singlecore and a quad definately won't trump a dual.

[jasonelmore]

so your saying Over 20% will?