• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

New consoles = better CPU optimization?

zoomee

zoomee

zoomee

Soldato
Joined
15 Dec 2004
Posts
5,756
Location
Hudds, UK
Just wondering - seeing as both the major new consoles will be shipping with AMD 8-core CPU's, will this make games more biased towards AMD?

In the past (PC wise) games usually have run better on Intel chips being designed to make optimum use of them probably due to the use of the intel compiler (which is obviously going to be biased :) )

What AMD CPU do these new consoles actually use? - i.e. are they actually bulldozer or whatever cores? - Think their x86 based so I'm pretty sure they will be better suited to games with coders having to do little to get them 'ported' to PC's.

Not sure of course as I don't understand the architecture very well, and obviously still undecided if I'll get an xbox 180 ( :p ) or a PS4 yet, but FPS has always been reserved for the PC for me - nowt beats the gud ol mouse/keyboard combo for them type of games!

PS - I hate the thought of my console having 'MOWAR CORES' than my PC - its just not right! ;)
 
More cores didn't always translate in to more performance(compared to Intel, or even some older tech AMD) - at least not with recent AMD chips.
Not sure how AMD will define a "Core" to be in consoles :)
 
They're Jaguar cores, low power cores.
So the consoles will have to utilise them like 100%, however, actual "next gen" gameplay footage is scarce, the only one I've seen is Dead Rising 3, and that was pretty choppy.

Hope that's down to the GPU.

It'll probably make engines more multi-threaded, but it's not going to make it AMD biased, as Intels total performance on their 4 cores is going to be right up there already.

It'll bridge the gap on newer games for sure, in that it'll be pretty much none existent (At least measuring average FPS)
 
The CPU in Xbox One & PS4 is 8 core but it's about as powerful as a dual core Pentium, so I don't think the CPU requirements in future console ports is going to be particularly demanding no matter what compiler is used. An Intel quad core i5 will chew through the threads with ease.
 
mmj_uk said:
The CPU in Xbox One & PS4 is 8 core but it's about as powerful as a dual core Pentium, so I don't think the CPU requirements in future console ports is going to be particularly demanding no matter what compiler is used. An Intel quad core i5 will chew through the threads with ease.
Click to expand...

Not quite, more like half a 3770K:

i7-3770K: 3.5GHz x 4 cores = 224 SP FLOPS, 112 DP FLOPS
PS4: 1.6GHz x 8 cores = 102.4 SP FLOPS, 38.4 DP FLOPS

According to some guy on the internet http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=35054106&postcount=17 :p
 
Not much off a Pentium.
Just on the SP Flops it's more than half, so that's i3ish performance, and the DP flops are about about 3.5 times slower.

Bearing in mind by the time these show their face we'll be on Haswell Pentiums lol.
 
On the consoles the game engines will almost certainly be compiled specifically with AMD optimisation. In some CPU intensive tasks that can more than double performance compared to generic optimised code. PC games are less likely to be optimised that way because the gain for AMD CPUs would come at the expense of performance on Intel CPUs.

That being said it's the use of multiple cores that is most significant. If a game were able to distribute its CPU load evenly across 8 cores (not a simple task), then you'd see double performance compared to the same CPU with 4 cores. i7s can make a gain over i5s in a similar way, due to HT. I imagine the new game engines will make very good use of the 8 cores, but not in the extreme of fully even distribution.
 
You wouldn't see double performance.
It goes 1/3/5/7 in cores as you get a scaling hit using 2 cores on a module, maxing out the module doesn't give you 100% of both cores.

Almost double, yes.

If it does double, it means they were using the cores in the wrong priority in the first place.

I'd be surprised if a clocked 2500K couldn't go toe to toe with an FX8350 in the newer games though, even with this "AMD Bias"
 
A linear progression can be shown on AMD CPUs with 2, 4, and 8 cores when software uses all available cores equally. This is the best scenario case anyway.

I'd bet quite a lot that the 2500K cannot reach an 8350 in BF4 or other upcoming Frostbite 3 games.
 
Unless they're running the core priority incorrectly, they shouldn't be showing 100% gain from 4-8 cores because of the hit when using both cores in a module, this is due to the shared resources.

Also, we'll see about BF4 etc, any difference between the two will be margin of error, exactly like now.
 
Last edited:
It may be nearly double rather than precisely double, I don't have the benchmarks to check right now.

BF4 will have AMD CPU optimisations in it. The other engines, we'll just have to wait and see how they perform.
 
With BD AMD touted 80% scaling in a module, that was in their slide.
I know they want to improve it with SR.

EDIT : And only 2 months for BF4, I don't understand why you think the FX8350 will best the 2500K, they'll both be at the limits of the GPU, unless AMD's FX8350 has some GPU performance behind it.
But whatever, we'll see.
 
Last edited:
BF4 multiplayer is likely to hit the CPU quite hard, I fully expect it's going to need an 8320/8350 or i7 to get the best performance out of it.
 
That already happens now with i5's, but we're talking dual GPU sets ups running 1080 (7970 Crossfire) at 1080p in 64 player maps, and it doesn't max the CPU, it just kind of does gives up at hangs about 80% usage in CPU and ~90% GPU usage on both cards.

Single 7970 etc and an i5 and you're fine even in those 64 player maps.

I haven't seen any FX8350 benchmarks with 7970's and 64 player maps under heavy situations, because I don't think many people are stupid enough to bottleneck such GPU sets ups with an FX8350 at 1080p.

But I've seen low resolution benchmarks to show a CPU bottleneck (Single card) guess what came up trumps? It wasn't the FX8350 and that's for sure, it was behind the i5.

Perhaps, in certain maps at 64 players with a 7970 overclocked crossfire set up at 1080p you might see a difference in GPU usage between the FX8350 and the 2500K, but in the same vain, you'll probably see the 2700k coasting along fine, as it's more of a thread limitation than anything at this level.

And if there is a difference in BF4 in that example, there might be that very same difference now.
 
Last edited:
BF3 can't really be taken to predict performance in BF4 though.

I'm not expecting that the 2500K will limp along in BF4, just that for high/max settings on a 7970, I do expect that you'll need an i7 or 8320/50 to get the best frame rates. The developers obviously aren't going to make the game barely playable for quad core Intel users, but they've already said the game will showcase AMD CPUs and GPUs.
 
Well we'll have to see, I can see it being a replicate situation of what we have now in the examples I've given, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't.

But stranger things have happened.
 
The AMD involvement is also why I think nvidia "2GB is more than enough" fans might be annoyed with BF4 ultra settings. No AMD GPU capable of running it that high has less than 3GB.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom