A silly i7 question

[regulus]

Would it help increase gaming performance by much? I currently run a e8400, a P45 mobo and 4870 and couldn't be more happier with the performance on all games. I won't upgrade for at least another 6-12 months...unless i7 is a big enough jump in gaming terms.

Is it?

 

[Greebo]

If you just have one gprahics card then no, hardly any at all.

If you have GTX280 SLI or even tri-sli then you will see a huge boost, maybe 50%+.

 

[Strife212]

Only SLI or Crossfire, then you will see huge boosts.

 

[regulus]

Ok, thanks. I'll hang on a year or so then. Or whack another 4870 1GB in when it comes down in price.

 

[WesleyBurns]

I have upgrade from a E8400 to a Core I7 920 overclocked to 3.8Ghz, and i haven't seen much increase at all in the demanding games like crysis.

Problem is the current graphics cards are a bottleneck. Other than that, the Core I7 blows the old Core2 away in benchmarking land. We will have to wait a few more months for the gfx cards, amoung other things, to catch up to reap the benifits of the Core i7 ...

I upgraded now, and awaiting next gen of gfx cards and then run SLI. The X58 is a great platform, massive memory bandwidth, and running SLI on the X58 scales very nicely!

 

[regulus]

I'm looking to throw in another 4870 1GB on XFire. It's hard to tell where the bottleneck is. I'm thinking the graphics cards might be. At the moment I'm playing Crysis on "Gamer", it looks beautiful and hardly ever drops below 40FPS.

 

[drunkenmaster]

If you just have one gprahics card then no, hardly any at all.

If you have GTX280 SLI or even tri-sli then you will see a huge boost, maybe 50%+.

any links that show that kind of number.

I've seen one review that compared a dual core C2D against a quad core nehalem and that was it. Most other reviews show lower detail levels/res to make the game cpu limited rather than gpu. I've not seen anything to suggest that i7's increase gaming performance for anyone, except in cpu bound situations which is one game in 10,000.

yes, if you have tri sli to run at 1920x1200, an i7 will help, but you should only be using quadfire or tri sli if the resolution you run at, needs it. at 1920x1200 tri sli or quadfire will still run high speeds, but just won't be maxed out, you're talking about going from 100fps, to 180fps, when your graphics cards aren't really be loading, however, move up to a 30" panel and resolution and the cards will again be limited and i7 will offer you nothing.


So unless you have more gfx cards than you know what to do with and point blank refuse to run them on a high res screen i7 won't help your fps increase.]

For everyone else that buys a gfx card that runs games at the resolution they want at a playable framerate, i7 won't help your fps at all.

 

[oweneades]

any links that show that kind of number.

I've seen one review that compared a dual core C2D against a quad core nehalem and that was it. Most other reviews show lower detail levels/res to make the game cpu limited rather than gpu. I've not seen anything to suggest that i7's increase gaming performance for anyone, except in cpu bound situations which is one game in 10,000.

The Guru3d review is more than enough to show the difference between a high clocked C2D (3ghz) and a I7 (3.2ghz). Given that most of the games they used show no difference (based on other reviews) between a dual core and a quad core it is a pretty good review to simply show the difference between a core 2 based system and a core i7 based system. (to put it another way a core2 quad wouldn't have shown much if any improvement over the core2 duo used in the review).

The performance differences at all resolutions were simply massive. The cpu limitation on the core2 was easy to see (more so on the Quadfire/tri-sli setups).

Depending on the game at lower resolutions it can still show a massive difference in performance especially if you need that all important 60fps target

http://www.guru3d.com/article/core-i7-multigpu-sli-crossfire-game-performance-review/10

I agree we could really do with more reviews but I see no reason to discount the guru3d review just because its the only one to show a difference (given its the only review of its kind its difficult to discount anyway as we have nothing to compare it to and I don't know of a reason not to trust the reviews Hilbert does).

 

[drunkenmaster]

Sorry but thats the exact review, almost every single other review shows a quad core, vs a quad core and NO difference. a few games slightly faster, a few games run slightly slower.

You can not bench a dual vs quad and call it even or remotely trust the results, we had a thread on it, its basically one of the worst reviews in the history of the internet in terms of hardware, and hell, there are some truly awful sites out there.

Yes, most games don't show a massive difference between a dual and a quad core in gaming, in GPU limited situation, with tri sli, or quadfire you simply aren't gpu limited at lower resolutions and quad vs dual core massively comes into play for simply being able to provide excess information above and beyond what is needed.

As I said, every other review shows no difference, its almost within testing error for either platform across all games.

i7 is not for gaming, you've never needed a top end cpu for gaming and you won't for at least several years to come.

I do and I don't want to bang on about this point but, VERY specifically, i7 offers no gaming improvement, that review is utter, utter, utter, utter trash. there are actually quite a few reviews that show crossfire and other high end solutions and zero difference, the difference being exactly that, they used a i7 quad vs a C2Q.

 

[drunkenmaster]

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTU4MCwyLCxoZW50aHVzaWE=

anandtech is the usual let down, but this one, the page before it, VERY clearly shows that the quad core C2Q and C2D are not at all remotely close to equal in not cpu limited situations, and gpu limited, not far apart if not the same, on that particular graph, the i7, in gpu limited situations is both slower than the c2d and the c2q.

Same situation shown basically across the board in reviews all over.

thats one of the better gaming reviews done. Non gpu limited, quad core of ANY kind, very much including the old quad cores gives the same performance and its massively more than a dual core, when not gpu limited. When gpu limited, you couldn't really care less what you have in there tbh, you're gpu limited, thats where you want to be.

A 4870 is cpu limited at 1280x1024, but gpu limited at 1920x1200, however, a tri sli setup is cpu limited at 4870, and at 1920x1200, its only just about gpu limited way up at the next step. If you have tri sli and are running at a low res, you simply wasted money, even there, extra frames are the unseeable e-peen type, not the, make games playable numbers.

 

[AWPC]

Very strange results from Hardocp there (what no love X58 from Intel or AMD have paid for it to be negative)as I have seen several other sites (I cannot link to as they contain competitors) where it clearly shows SLI has much better scaling than Crossfire with I7-965 and up to 30% more gaming FPS

Some games will benefit less from I7 but as more and more games use multicore in future it will pull away.

Nvidia for sure have drivers now which are offering in some games up to 100% scaling with X58 vs ATI are up to 20% behind in this area. So looks like NV have done their homework and AI are playing catchup still on X58 drivers.

Once drivers mature I7 will be quicker still but for now its around 20-25% faster than QX9770 @ 1920x1200 which is still an achievement with less cache & lower latency.