Seemingly inexplicable poor FPS in games

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Please teppic don't derail this into yet another Intel vs AMD and "newer games will uses more cores blah blah blah...", when this topic is about (older) games that use 4 cores or less, not a discussion for PC gaming in general. Seriously your above post is totally irrelevant to this topic.

I found his post very relevant and useful. It's not even about older games or newer games, it's about if my settings are wrong or the code is ****e. WoT isn't an old game. And TS is less then 12 months old.

Don't most if not, all games use a max of 4 cores which is why the AMD 8 core isn't good for gaming? Half of it's power is left on the table?

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

It's as relevant as posts saying his CPU is crap.

Exactly...CPU isn't crap, it's just not as good for gaming as an Intel but still plays all my games at max so yeah...I'll stick with it thanks.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

You honestly think your talk of "future games uses more cores" is as relevant as "Bulldozer's extremely weak single-threaded performance making it one of the worst CPU for light-threaded games" relating to (older) games that use low number of cores?

Sorry there's some seriously flaw in your logic.

Talking about my CPU is COMPLETELY irrelevant as it isn't the problem.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

This is exactly it. This is why I said regardless of a game use 1 core or up to 4 cores, an overclocked i5 will get far less performance hit, because it can practically deliver twice the processing power over the same number of cores.

Ok, so that's fine. Basically, when running a game that uses 4 cores and not 8, I'm using a 2400mhz 4 core CPU. I can see this causing problems but, I'm not experiencing them. The CPU ran fine yesterday and I had no problems. I've got WoT running as well as it can with the mods, Trainz we know is broken and Train Sim is running pretty good with max anti-aliasing and even better with it turned down to a mid-range setting. The difference in quality even with it off is very small. Some blurring on rails, mid-range setting, it's fine.

So, my best bet and cheapest solution, at the end of all this would be to go and buy the fastest 4 core AM3+ CPU I can find. I'm not getting Intel because I've just spent £1,500 on my system and I'm not spending another £1,500 on it this year. Maybe in January I'll build something with all the new processors that are coming out and a Hawaii graphics card as I've never used AMD GPU.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

What about a 4350? That starts at 4.2Ghz? Cheap as well at £90.

Answer me this people...I develop websites so, I have a lot of monitors and a lot of programs open at once doing a lot of things.

Dreamweaver sucks juice from the CPU, as does all the FTP clients and other things!

Going to simplify this beyond simple.

If I have two programs open, do program A run on core 1 and program B run on core 2? Does the OS run on one or two cores and then the other 6 runs programs?

OR

Work is shared between the 8 cores, so 50% of Program A runs on core 1 and 50% on core 2....think you get the idea.


Or am I way off track?

I only ask because...if I was to get a quad core for gaming, which I'm doing more and more of now I have a decent GPU, am I going to notice a reduction in performance loading programs, saving files, transferring files etc compared to my current octo core?

If so, then I have another Crosshair 5 board that I could build up as my work system using my old GPU or a 660TI, or two, as long as I have enough ports for a minimum of 2 monitors. Get some cheaper RAM and air cool my work system. I can't stand the noise, needs to be quiet when you're sat next to it 17 hours a day without games drowning out the noise.

Other option is to spend £4,000 roughly on a new Intel system, with Hawaii and watercooling in the new year, specifically for gaming.

Idealling, the quad or hex core won't impact my day to day work and I can get that and be a happy chappy with more gaming power.

I think this is the point where I say...discuss?

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Ok cool but is windows distributing program's workload across cores or is it program dependent? My work is more important then gsmes so if dropping cores is going to cause my work to slow down, not good.

Would the 4 core 4.2ghz fx overclock higher then the 6 core and this provide more gaming performance?

I think the console thing isn't entirely accurate as I'm sure Sony and Microsoft are manufacturing the hardware themselves under license so AMD has little direct involvement. Might be wrong or it is irrelevant.

When's Steamroller due out?

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Think you might want to have a read around some of the more uptodate news on the consoles.

Both PS4 and XboxOne will be using AMD 8 cores Jaguar CPU supposingly clock at 2.00GHz and 1.60GHz (so probably not even half as fast as an overclocked FX8320/8350), so AMD would be working closely with game developers for optimising the multi-platform (or at least in theory they would). I'm certain that neither Sony or Microsoft would appreciate anyone pointing it out, but both next gen consoles are effectively x86 PC under the console hood

They are x86 basically. And, the chips aren't being made by AMD, Microsoft and Sony have both licensed the designs for the chips from AMD and will be choosing a manufacturer, whether or not that will be AMD themselves, we'll have to see but it doesn't look like AMD will have much involvement past designing the chips. The chips are APUs that are more powerful then what AMD is manufacturing themselves.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Separate programs will always get distributed across the cores. Whether one program's load is distributed depends on how it's written - newer apps and games tend to use more than one core, while very efficient code can use all of them (e.g. video encoding).

The 6300 can often overclock to 5GHz even on air. That's about as high as you'd want to push Piledriver cores, as higher than that just uses up lots of power and generates a lot of heat. The 8320 isn't much more (£125), but because of the extra cores, it can be harder to overclock as high.

So in games that only use one or two cores you'd get some improvement (because Piledriver is faster than Bulldozer), while in games that could use more than 4 cores, you'd get a much better increase. But like I said, RTS games tend not to use many cores.

Steamroller is due sometime next year. The expectation is it'll work in your board, but it's not guaranteed. The hope is that Steamroller will increase the performance of each core enough that older games perform a lot better, while making new ones much faster.

So what you're saying is that I'd benefit from a 6300 overclocked to the sky? I have pretty extensive watercooling so heat won't be an issue.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Why on Earth would anyone spend 1.5K and end up with an FX8150?

How have you got that far through the thread and worked out I've spent £1,500 and bought an FX8150, board, RAM, and everything else for that budget and watercooled it all?

I've had the 8150 for at least a year. When I bought it, I thought more cores the better. For what I'm using my system for everyday, that is true but not for gaming. Now I'm looking for a solution, improve gaming as I'm gaming more now then before while maintaining the multi-tasking (if that's the right term) capabilities of my system.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Since most of the games you play won't be using more than 6 cores, a 6300 clocked to 5GHz is your best bet. If you might start playing shooters and stuff, then the 8320 is a good choice.

Ok, so...slow games (RTS, sims etc) 6 cores good. More speed per core. For fast paced games and multi-core games, more cores the better! There's a couple of 6300 going nice and cheap, sub-£100. Even then, £110 off OCUK won't break the bank and I need to build a second system so starting to upgrade my current system isn't a bad idea.

Another thing that's been puzzling me, is RAM. AMD says 1600mhz is the max, board says 2600mhz(or something) is max supported. Overclocking, I want RAM faster then 1600mhz becuase adjusting the bus underclocks my RAM. What shall I go for? 1800ish so I can overclock or can I run faster then 1600mhz with the AMD?

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

It'll probably run more than 1600MHZ, just not officially, the original Intel i7's were rated for 1066MHZ but ran much faster.
Also, not strictly true about RTS's in the slightest, my 4670K will blaze any AMD chip in RTS's, DOWII can barely push 60 FPS average with an AMD chip, I push 110.
Crysis 3? A so called example of multi-threading, the FX8350's are only going to reach parity with me down to the GPU bottleneck.
Shogun 2 also shows the AMD chips to come up trumps, and RTW2 will do the same thing.

Anything over 40FPS is good for me. I use 60hz monitors so that's the max FPS I want anyway.

As mentioned before and in other threads, I will be building an Intel system but I'm not spending anymore money on computers this year. Especially not the multiple thousands I'll spend on an Intel system. Board, CPU and RAM will be £1,000 pretty much. I'd want 500GB SSD, so there's another £1,000. i want to check out the new AMD GPU and that'll probably be, you guessed it, £1,000. Watercooling, case, PSU and BD drive...£1,000. So there's £4,000 and I've probably missed a thing or two. Suppose big 120mhz or higher monitor will be required, plus keyboard and mouse and speakers, another £1,000. So that's £5,000 in total. It can wait!!!

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Well, only because as I said before, he's not playing games that make use of 8 cores and the 6 core CPUs overclock more easily.

And I won't be leaving performance on the table as each core is more powerful on a 6 core compared to my 8 core. Stock, my 8 core is 8x450. 4.2 6 core is 700mhz a core and overclocked higher. Lets just say it'll run at 4.8, same as my 8 core now. 8 core is 500 per core. 6 core is 800. Total 8 core power in 4 core game, 2000mhz. Total 6 core power in 4 core game is 3200mhz. I'm basically going to get 50% more power. Equivalent 8 core clock would be like 7ghz. Definitely buying a 6370, think that's the 4.2ghz one. And let's not forget, I'll get 5ghz on the 6300 so that's even better.

Anyone disagree with my logic here? I think it makes sense!

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

I didn't read all that logic

But each core of the 6300 is more powerful at the same clock as each on your 8150, so if you push the cores to 5GHz, you've got a nice bump. For games that use more than one core well, that overall improvement keeps getting higher.

Like a 60% performance increase. go for the top retail speed one as logic suggests, AMD has chosen the best chips to clock to the top speed so they'll overclock the best!

Above post is wrong. It's the quad core that is 4.2 ghz which leads me to suggest, isn't that the one to get as none of my games use more then 4 cores? Or it a good shout to have the two extra cores for my everyday work. Best compromise and try for 5.2ghz or something?

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

That logic doesn't work at all.
It's not 60% performance gain in the slightest.

It's a good thing you've got the money to burn.

Care to elaborate or just continue with the sarcasm? People say to be humble and ask for help, here I am asking and I get sarcastic condescending elitist responses. Can't win!

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

I wouldn't drop to the 4350. You save nothing, lose 1/3 of the CPU's cores. Unless you want to do it for the fun of it I wouldn't bother trying to get Piledriver above 5GHz, but with water cooling you can get 6300s over.

Some games you play may take advantage of the 6 cores (e.g. Sim City shows an improvement). If you decide to play shooter type games, some of the recent ones definitely do.

Cool. Thanks dude. Been super helpful. Learnt a fair bit today just from been shown how things benefit from things. I'm gonna order the 6350 just because in my mind, it gives me a better shot at higher clocks. Yes it may be a chip that only just does the stock clock and goes no higher but, if AMD are choosing the best chips for high stock clocks, then buying on of those improves the lottery of getting a chip that clocks well. It's only £15 or so the difference.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

The IPC gains with PD aren't even that great, it's like ~10% at best.
Then the instruction sets might gain a bit.

What does all that mean? Educate me please, I'm open to learning.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

No 6300/6350 will be stuck at stock clocks. I've never heard of a 6300 that couldn't reach 4.5GHz on a good board like you've got. I'd go with the 6300 myself, but if you don't mind the £15 extra who am I to argue

Ordered the 6350. Will be here Friday so I'll post my findings over the improvement in both gaming and lots of programs running. Will be interesting. Thanks again dude. Really useful community member.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Glad to help. As for the IPC thing, it just comes down to the improvement you'd get from one of your CPU's cores at say 4GHz to the new CPU also at 4GHz. The 6300/6350 has a couple of CPU instruction sets that your 8150 doesn't have, if games/apps make use of those they'll see another improvement on top.

Sweet. Up till last week I was using two 9800GX2 graphics cards so they were always the limiting factor. Now of course, it seems the CPU is. This should do me for a while I think. Going to start learning about hardware again. It's been 10 years since I was properly into hardware and knew as much about it as you guys on here. I forget things have changed dramatically and nothing I knew back then is relevant, not that I can remember it. I remember the big who ha when DDR1 became common place and a 64mb graphics card was awesome. Crazy how fast things are advancing. In another ten years, its going to be insane to think where we'll be. CPU speeds seem incredibly slow to increase in comparison. They haven't doubled in the last 10 years whereas everything else has improved 100x or more. Guessing the core technology or manufacturing process is restricting faster speeds. Someone needs to work out how to put CPU in series or SLI and we can all use dual CPU boards. That would be cool.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Take a look at this BF4 video to see where we already are with games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9yVV6g3q7g

Looks awesome. New red alert looks interesting. I read a thing or two on that and its a revolutionary red alert.

I wish simulators had these sorts of engines. They always seem low budget or lesser budget.

 

[Th3M8dH8tt3r]

Just want to point out while upgrading from Bulldozer to Piledriver (i.e. your 8150 to 6300/6350/8320) is not a bad option if you want performance increase without breaking the bank, the performance however increase is not gonna be that huge teppic seem to imply. As both me and Martini1991 pointed out, the Piledriver is only 10% faster than Bulldozer when both are on the same clock.

Let's pretend the instruction sets would help and bring the overall increase up by another 5% and bringing it up to 15% faster than Bulldozer (it won't be that much, but I will give it an overestimation just for illustration purpose anyway)- so how does that translate to in terms of real-world gain in games? Let's suppose your Bulldozer does minimum 22fps and average 40fps in a game that use 4 cores or less, Piledriver on the same clock with 15% increase in performance would mean the frame rate would goes from that to minimum 25fps and average to 46fps. It's "decent" increase in frame rate, but the overall performance still left much to desire. "Why?" You might ask? This is because an overclock i5 in the same game would have the minimum frame rate hitting 50fps+, and average frame rate would be quite over 60fps at most time (more like 70-90fps range). Take another CPU demanding game for example...say Guild Wars 2. This game known for how CPU demanding it is, and it is one of the few mmorpg that would actually use "up to" 4 cores (despite the CPU usage would only hit 75-80% max on all 4 cores at the same time). There are some extremely CPU demanding scenes such as field boss battle with 30-40 players fighting the boss and its army of minions, scenes like this the overclocked AMD 8 core's frame rate would be hitting as low as 15fps and under, where as an overclocked i5 would still be able to hold 28-30fps. The difference is between 14-15fps vs 28-30fps is "unplayable" and "playable".

It is simply this- an overclocked Piledriver FX8 CPU "could" come close to matching the performance of overclocked i5 in games that use up to 8 cores such as BF, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3 etc; but the lesser the cores that a game uses, the further the overclocked Piledriver FX8 slips away from the overclocked i5's gaming performance. The fundamental different between Intel's approach and AMD is simply that Intel's higher IPC approach will not only increase performance for new games, but older games as well (or games using dated engines that use less than 4 cores); whereas AMD's "more core" approach would benefit games only if games would make use of the extra cores.

AMD's IPC side of things has been at a standstill since the Phenom II (Bulldozer even saw it fell lower than that of the Phenom II). AMD's more cores approach is definitely sounded, but their problem is that they failed to increase the IPC from Phenom II at the same time while pushing for more cores. This is why almost everyone is really looking forward to what the Steamroller can bring. As I have said before, AMD don't need to beat Intel on IPC- they just need to bring out something in the same price bracket that offer per core performance close to i5, and offer more cores at the same time, and they would already be a winner- kinda like how the FX6300 vs i3 is. But I think it would be more difficult to achieve on the higher up range CPU, as unlike the i3, the i5 K's overclocking ability was not crippled.

But who knows? Back in the days nobody saw the "AMD Athlon 64 hanged the Pentium 4 out to dry" train coming We certainly need to to see history repeat itself again, as Intel NEED a huge "down boy!" wack from AMD, as their price is starting to get out of control. I honestly hope AMD's Steamroller is the answer to our prayers.

Awesome post!

I did a bit of reading on IPC as I wanted to know what it was and did. From what I understand, there's two approaches. First is high clock, low IPC. Second is low clock, high IPC. AMD has always been the latter, which is I guess why when we had the xxxxXP+ range, a 2400XP+ was 2Ghz but the 2400 meant it was equivalent to a 2.4 Intel. This was at the time that Intel was busy pushing the speed of processors. Makes sense as the higher the clock, the better the Intel.

Intel's approach and AMD is simply that Intel's higher IPC approach will not only increase performance for new games

Don't Intel go for a lower IPC, higher clock approach and AMD the opposite? Or are you saying they're increasing their IPC while maintaining high clocks? At the end of the day, AMD and Intel are on par with clock speeds so is this that AMD have reduced their IPC?

I was reading about the Steamroller too. Should be out in the next 6 - 7 months!