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i5 vs i7 in future games

FARGO

FARGO

FARGO

Associate
Joined
5 Aug 2010
Posts
1,990
Just a quick question-

It seems that the majority or people feel that the i5 range of processors fair just as well (and in certain areas better) that i7's when it comes to gaming.

I was wondering if this would still be true when titles such as Rage come to the market? By todays standard I get the impression that it will require a lot more grunt, especially with the textures.

I'm not knowledgeable when it comes to such things, so please don't flame! I suppose I'm wondering if/when i7's will offer better performance for newer titles, or is it very much dependent on GPU and likely to stay this way?

Thanks for any insight!
 
Most of the time with game playing gpu is king but some titles also need lots of cpu as well also if you have top flight sli or xfire that will need lots of cpu power to feed the cards so you cant have too much of either if you want to run top titles with all the eye candy enabled.

Ive just upgraded to sandy bridge from i7 930 clocked to 3.8 and i see higher fps with the Sandy bridge colcket at 4.5 i know i had 100s of fps with the old i7 but whats over kill today is too slow tomorrow.
 
THe only real difference between an i5 7xx and a quad i7 9** is the hyperthreading. Hyperthreading has been around for a long long time, and has never really been utilised by game developers. Since they're not even using the full potential of the 4 physical cores, theres no reason to believe games will suddenly start using hyperthreading.

The i7 9**'s are socket 1366, which means they have triple channel ram and (usually) more bandwidth on the PCI-E slots. Nice features, but nothing games actually benefit from unless perhaps you're crossfiring dual gpu cards.
 
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until the next console refresh anything current will be more than fine...maybe when the console refresh happens the gains in i7 will be more obvious (if a port of a game came to pc of course) but by then i7 will be years old and were be on 20nm chips.

in short: pc gaming badly needs the console refresh to happen sooner rather than later.
 
From a programmer's perspective it would be still hard to optimize the game engines for multi cores in the next decade, unless the L3 latency could be further brought down by an order of magnitude or two. The performance gain from multi-core is still with serious diminishing returns. I am confident to ask you guys to list nowadays which game heavily rely on more than two CPU cores, given that you only need 60 fps at max settings? It is still easy to achieve 4.5GHz stable on dual-core i3, whose gaming performance is pretty close to that of 4GHz quad/hex cores.
 
iamtheoneneo said:
in short: pc gaming badly needs the console refresh to happen sooner rather than later.
Click to expand...

Which just isn't going to happen for at least 3 years I reckon, perhaps even longer. MS have recently said they believe the Xbox 360 to be halfway through it's life span, and it's 5 years old!
 
drifting said:
From a programmer's perspective it would be still hard to optimize the game engines for multi cores in the next decade, unless the L3 latency could be further brought down by an order of magnitude or two.
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How is cache latency the the overriding constraint? From a programmer's perspective do you not find devising ways to reliably and economically (in terms of development time) parallelise largely linear problems to be the challenge? I'd genuinely like to know :)

Oh and you do know if L3 cache latency was brought down by two orders of magnitude it would be less than one clock cycle? Heck even one order of magnitude puts it in L1 territory.
 
iamtheoneneo said:
until the next console refresh anything current will be more than fine...maybe when the console refresh happens the gains in i7 will be more obvious (if a port of a game came to pc of course) but by then i7 will be years old and were be on 20nm chips.

in short: pc gaming badly needs the console refresh to happen sooner rather than later.
Click to expand...

Sadly this is so very true. PC Gaming is pretty much going nowhere in terms of actually making use of all this amazing new hardware til the next gen of consoles come out.
Anything current will be more than fine.... anything 2 years old will likely be just as fine unless gaming at resolutions above 1600x1200 ish...
 
Fourstar said:
How is cache latency the the overriding constraint? From a programmer's perspective do you not find devising ways to reliably and economically (in terms of development time) parallelise largely linear problems to be the challenge? I'd genuinely like to know :)

Oh and you do know if L3 cache latency was brought down by two orders of magnitude it would be less than one clock cycle? Heck even one order of magnitude puts it in L1 territory.
Click to expand...

Real-time game rendering is demanding low latency communications between threads.. Just because of the nature of games - lots of branching - it's a pain to parallelise. The master thread is always waiting for the slave threads to submit results (reduce), while the slave threads are always waiting for new tasks to be assigned to (broadcast). Profiling and dealing with such performance issues simply costs too much time and money, for both development and maintenance. That's why I strongly prefer a 5GHz dual-core over a 4GHz quad/hex core for gaming, even for my own small-scale scientific computing.
 
drifting said:
Real-time game rendering is demanding low latency communications between threads.. Just because of the nature of games - lots of branching - it's a pain to parallelise. The master thread is always waiting for the slave threads to submit results (reduce), while the slave threads are always waiting for new tasks to be assigned to (broadcast). Profiling and dealing with such performance issues simply costs too much time and money, for both development and maintenance.
Click to expand...
Interesting, I knew managing communication between threads was a right pain in these kind of situations but not that latency was one of the problems.

Do you think there is a happy middle ground between today's dumping of major subsystems in their own threads and a massively threaded engine?
 
drifting said:
Real-time game rendering is demanding low latency communications between threads.. Just because of the nature of games - lots of branching - it's a pain to parallelise. The master thread is always waiting for the slave threads to submit results (reduce), while the slave threads are always waiting for new tasks to be assigned to (broadcast). Profiling and dealing with such performance issues simply costs too much time and money, for both development and maintenance. That's why I strongly prefer a 5GHz dual-core over a 4GHz quad/hex core for gaming, even for my own small-scale scientific computing.
Click to expand...

I love reading the little gems of information like this that crop up sometimes. Especially from a programmer's perspective too, makes for very interesting reading. :)
 
Fourstar said:
Interesting, I knew managing communication between threads was a right pain in these kind of situations but not that latency was one of the problems.

Do you think there is a happy middle ground between today's dumping of major subsystems in their own threads and a massively threaded engine?
Click to expand...

If the scheduler breaks up tasks into shorter pieces then the communication overhead becomes obvious. If the scheduler doesn't break up tasks into short enough pieces then some threads may end up idle while some busy, making the overall utilization low.

A simple example would be to start WinRAR and press Alt+B. Windows Task Manager would show a rather low CPU utilization over all cores. This is not because WinRAR is silly, it's just not easy.
 
I doubt games will ever use hyerthreading. They still cant even fully use 4 cores, and we are already up to 6 core CPUs and 8 cores soon.

Its always better to disable HT to get an extra 200+ Mhz overclock on your CPU for games, you will get more performance and lower temps.
 
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