Could AMD cpu's be viable with dx12

[Lokken86]

Just a thought. Has anyone thought that with dx12 on the horizon perhaps AMD cpus could once again be suitable for high end gear, what with the reduced cpu overheads.

I guess we will find out what gains are to be had soon enough.

 

[gpuerrilla]

Not high end gear. If you had the money for this bracket you would be i7 all day.

 

[ukxenon]

For.low to mid range it will help but high end I don't think so

 

[meldarthx]

its a wait and see - pure high end; not until Zen which is next year; but bigger lease on life on some of the older stuff......for sure

 

[Poneros]

AMD CPUs are already viable, but only up to a certain price point. As for them getting back into the high-end again. It's a fantasy & will never happen again.

 

[Killer7xx]

AMD CPUs are already viable, but only up to a certain price point. As for them getting back into the high-end again. It's a fantasy & will never happen again.

If Zen can bring them up to Haswell levels of performance per core then I'd say they are back in the high end. If you're talking about socket 2011 CPUs then perhaps not unless AMD actually brings in a true 6/8 core CPU.

As skylake performance is not projected to be much more than 10-15% better than haswell at most, I'd say AMD has a chance of having great CPUs in terms of price/performance. The worry is that Intel may have another giant leapfrog in the works for the next new architecture after skylake.

 

[anthony566]

I have to say I am looking forward to seeing if the Zen is a good leap forward for AMD....

 

[fs123]

If Zen can bring them up to Haswell levels of performance per core then I'd say they are back in the high end. If you're talking about socket 2011 CPUs then perhaps not unless AMD actually brings in a true 6/8 core CPU.

As skylake performance is not projected to be much more than 10-15% better than haswell at most, I'd say AMD has a chance of having great CPUs in terms of price/performance. The worry is that Intel may have another giant leapfrog in the works for the next new architecture after skylake.

Skylake performance is less than 5% faster than a 4790K in gaming and sometimes slower judging by most reviews, unless you get DDR4 that is faster than 3600MHZ and even then it matches DDR3 2400MHz. Zen has a decent chance if it can match Haswell for sure.

 

[Cooper]

Zen has a decent chance if it can match Haswell for sure.

Zen will only bring AMD up to about the level of a 2500k Sandybridge in terms of IPC per core according to their own performance gain estimates of a 40% improvement over the FX range.

As always AMD will go down the value route, probably offering a 6 core Zen for the price of a 4 core Skylake...which should make them a faster, cheaper gaming CPU.

 

[Lokken86]

It wouldn't matter if it only had 40% increase and Intel are still way faster if it was cutting through dx12 games anyway. Hell Intel could be 100times faster but I wouldn't care if I could run the games without being bottlenecked.
My hope is that while remaining in second place AMD cpus will still have more than enough power to game with top end gpus installed.
We can dream.

 

[almoststew1990]

I've been wondering whether DX12 will create a "black hole" for gaming (assuming the marketting and 'theory' of DX12 is correct).

I mean... say a Sandy i3 probably can't run Mafia II, GTA IV, V, ARMA 3 etc very well, but with games that use DX12, it will suddenly be fine. So we'll have the bizzare situation where DX9 10 11 games that need a decent CPU can't be played, but new games that use DX12 can be played? So you'll still need a decent CPU to play current (i.e 2014 /2015) games.

And then we'll have the problem where new games slowly shift over to the new DX. Considering that DX revisions usually don't add much game changing stuff, the slow change isn't a problem. But if DX12 results in a whole different (more basic) class of PC being able to play games, surely the change to DX12 should be as quick and thorough as possible so we don't have half of the games needing a decent CPU and half that don't?

Otherwise We'll all have to buy a decent CPU anyway.

 

[Cooper]

Sure..if people start to see benchmarks in games that show 6/8 slightly slower Zen cores are no bottleneck and outperforming 4 core Skylakes because of DX12 multi threading improvements, then for many that will be good enough to consider a move back to AMD if the price is also right...an 8 core Zen for £250-£300 would be very tempting for many.

..and if the other result is to make Intel finally move to 6/8 core parts for the mainstream then its a double win for everyone.

 

[nashathedog]

If Zen can bring them up to Haswell levels of performance per core then I'd say they are back in the high end. If you're talking about socket 2011 CPUs then perhaps not unless AMD actually brings in a true 6/8 core CPU.

As skylake performance is not projected to be much more than 10-15% better than haswell at most, I'd say AMD has a chance of having great CPUs in terms of price/performance. The worry is that Intel may have another giant leapfrog in the works for the next new architecture after skylake.

Price performance? We do not have a clue on price but you tend to get what you pay for from AMD so if the new cpu's come close to matching Intels performance you can bet you left ball the price will be close too. (Providing you have balls that is )

Zen sounds promising to me, 8 or more cores will be nice especially if as hinted they have AMD's own version of hyper-threading and can give single thread performance that's close to Haswells.

 

[nashathedog]

I've been wondering whether DX12 will create a "black hole" for gaming (assuming the marketting and 'theory' of DX12 is correct).

I mean... say a Sandy i3 probably can't run Mafia II, GTA IV, V, ARMA 3 etc very well, but with games that use DX12, it will suddenly be fine. So we'll have the bizzare situation where DX9 10 11 games that need a decent CPU can't be played, but new games that use DX12 can be played? So you'll still need a decent CPU to play current (i.e 2014 /2015) games.

And then we'll have the problem where new games slowly shift over to the new DX. Considering that DX revisions usually don't add much game changing stuff, the slow change isn't a problem. But if DX12 results in a whole different (more basic) class of PC being able to play games, surely the change to DX12 should be as quick and thorough as possible so we don't have half of the games needing a decent CPU and half that don't?

Otherwise We'll all have to buy a decent CPU anyway.

We won't see current games getting DX12 updates, There may be 1 or 2 but no dev's going to go back and start rewriting everything for a game they've already had there sales on. It just won't happen.

 

[Calin Banc]

I've been wondering whether DX12 will create a "black hole" for gaming (assuming the marketting and 'theory' of DX12 is correct).

I mean... say a Sandy i3 probably can't run Mafia II, GTA IV, V, ARMA 3 etc very well, but with games that use DX12, it will suddenly be fine. So we'll have the bizzare situation where DX9 10 11 games that need a decent CPU can't be played, but new games that use DX12 can be played? So you'll still need a decent CPU to play current (i.e 2014 /2015) games.

And then we'll have the problem where new games slowly shift over to the new DX. Considering that DX revisions usually don't add much game changing stuff, the slow change isn't a problem. But if DX12 results in a whole different (more basic) class of PC being able to play games, surely the change to DX12 should be as quick and thorough as possible so we don't have half of the games needing a decent CPU and half that don't?

Otherwise We'll all have to buy a decent CPU anyway.

You need to have enough spare room, however, if you're looking strictly at the API bottleneck, it looks like fx6300 is almost as good as i5 4690k, which is something (with the fx8350 being better, probably closer to an i7). http://www.ticgn.com/directx-12-destroys-competing-apis-with-up-to-1600-improvement/

In the end will also matter how well the other tasks are threaded, like physics and AI. If ArmA 3 still does most of the stuff single threaded, only the elimination of API bottleneck won't do that much. Simulation is pretty much single threaded and will bring down the performance.

On the other hand, if the physics is also as nicely threaded as in Crysis 3, the fx range could compete very well with current Intel's offerings.

For sure, just as BF 4 brought new life in older system through Mantle, so will DX12. At least until developers will use that extra room for something else.

 

[Nasher]

I think they will be, but not until we get dx12 starts to take off. I'm hoping AMD will jump ahead for gaming performance, because they are much cheaper

 

[jigger]

Zen will only bring AMD up to about the level of a 2500k Sandybridge in terms of IPC per core according to their own performance gain estimates of a 40% improvement over the FX range.

As always AMD will go down the value route, probably offering a 6 core Zen for the price of a 4 core Skylake...which should make them a faster, cheaper gaming CPU.

If AMD offer Sandybridge performance per core, with 6,8, and 12 core desktop options that would be fantastic.

AMD don't even need to match Sandybridge performance to put everything Intel currently has under serious pressure from multi core Zen chips.

If I was building a system now then using an FX 8 core would make a lot of sense.

 

[KiNgPiN83]

So I didn't realise the size difference between AMD and Intel until i just looked it up... For AMD to be where they are right now is pretty impressive considering their size difference with Intel. Intel are a massive massive company with 10x the number of employees(100000+) and 10x the revenue. Even Nvidia aren't too far off AMD employee count wise 8000+ compared to 9000+.

On a side note i did my bit for them the other day and bought an 8350 as part of my old AMD system upgrade.

 

[gpuerrilla]

They will definitely be usable to game at a reasonable level on the titles that spend the time developing them to utilise all cores efficiently. Lower overheads will also paper over the cracks making them perform at times on par with intel.

As for the wait.. dont know when we are likely to see this come to fruition for regular releases. My FX is now coming up to two years old and I was a late adopter. Some members here like to point out it is 2012 technology.

On the positive side by the time this FX is upgraded I will transition to a far superior cpu with more than just the classic 10% ipc improvement!

 

[Lokken86]

So I didn't realise the size difference between AMD and Intel until i just looked it up... For AMD to be where they are right now is pretty impressive considering their size difference with Intel. Intel are a massive massive company with 10x the number of employees(100000+) and 10x the revenue. Even Nvidia aren't too far off AMD employee count wise 8000+ compared to 9000+.

On a side note i did my bit for them the other day and bought an 8350 as part of my old AMD system upgrade.

I noticed also the other day that AMD have a market cap of 1.4billion compared to Intel at 134billion .