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Who's the daddy? Cores > IPC & Frequency ?

geordiejc said:
This article claims that in many games (list below) the number of cores > frequency however when you look at the 7700k vs 4770k its clear that IPC & frequency wins.

The 6900k (8/16) vs 7700k /(4/8) is only 7% faster (3.2hgz 8/16) vs 4.2 (4/8)

Can anyone do the math to show correlation of frequency & cores vs fps? e.g. if you had 6900k @ 4.2hgz and 7700k @ 4.2hgz - i suspect that the gains would not be vast.

I'm not looking for a value for money comparison, that segways into another subject.

https://videocardz.com/66354/core-count-vs-frequency-what-matters-for-gaming

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If you are not looking for value of money, your words, then it would have to be the fasts CPU in that chart, which is the 6900K, followed by the 6850K and last of 3 the 7700K.

More threads are obviously better than less.
 
geordiejc said:
Hey, mind if ask you to clarify what you mean ? I'm not following. i'm suggesting if the 6900k and 7700k's frequency was the same, what would be the performance gain in a range of games due to the extra cores of the 6900k?
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Look at the Core i7 6850K:

https://ark.intel.com/products/94188/Intel-Core-i7-6850K-Processor-15M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

Its a 3.6GHZ to 3.8GHZ design with 6 cores.

The Core i7 7700K runs at a massive clockspeed advantage:

https://ark.intel.com/products/97129/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-4_50-GHz

It runs at 4.2GHZ to 4.5GHZ with 4 cores.

SKL has better IPC than BW-E.

The average overclock of the Core i7 6800K on HWBOT with 2783 submissions is around 4.5GHZ:

http://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/core_i7_6850k/

On HWBOT the average Core i7 7700K overclock is 4.8GHZ:

http://hwbot.org/hardware/processor/core_i7_7700k/

If we say 5GHZ for a Core i7 7700K,then it is only 10% higher than its maximum boost clockspeed.

However,the Core i7 6850K overclock is closer to 20% over its maximum boost clockspeed.

In the review in the OP,the Core i7 6850K is ahead of the Core i7 7700K.

If you take overclocking into consideration,the Core i7 7700K won't make up the difference.

Edit!!

Another thing is won't surprise me if those HEDT CPUs are more TDP limited too than a Core i7 7700K.
 
@CAT-THE-FIFTH & @humbug

Would an 8c/16t BW-E CPU with the same clock speeds as an 4c/8t KBL provide only a few more fps due to the increased core availability? - if so, why is AMD pushing 8c/16t as if the 8c gaming era is here and now?

Thanks for your input so far i'm just trying to get to the bottom of this as i'm considering going to an 8c now but only if i'm going to benefit over the next year or so in terms of games using all 8 cores. Otherwise i'll make do with my haswell and upgrade to 8c when its beneficial for gaming in a mainstream sense.
 
geordiejc said:
@CAT-THE-FIFTH & @humbug

Would an 8c/16t BW-E CPU with the same clock speeds as an 4c/8t KBL provide only a few more fps due to the increased core availability? - if so, why is AMD pushing 8c/16t as if the 8c gaming era is here and now?

Thanks for your input so far i'm just trying to get to the bottom of this as i'm considering going to an 8c now but only if i'm going to benefit over the next year or so in terms of games using all 8 cores. Otherwise i'll make do with my haswell and upgrade to 8c when its beneficial for gaming in a mainstream sense.
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Looking at the HEDT results,I think the 6C seems to be probably the best mix of cores and clockspeed currently,its why I think the R5 1600X will probably be the best mix of price,performance and longevity in the Ryzen range for gaming.

Regarding your current system,I still think it has some legs,so I would wait and see how things pan out first.
 
I think you're right about the 6 core. Looking at the average FPS the 6850k 6 core is within 1.6 fps of the 6900k, as it stands the additional 2 cores over the 6 core CPU aren't worth having.

EDIT How much is the r5 1600x rumoured to cost? i know the 6850k is £620, but that price is different from a lot of other online retailers. A 8c Ryzen is still the better buy @ £320 even though it doesn't add more fps over the intel 6c (at present)

my heads mashed thinking about this tbh :)
 
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You also need to think about how much stress the CPU is under, the less cores you have to more they will be loaded, more cores = less load on the CPU.

Give me till the end of the day to set something up, i'll show you how easy it is to load up 4 cores and bottleneck a midrange GPU.
 
geordiejc said:
I think you're right about the 6 core. Looking at the average FPS the 6850k 6 core is within 1.6 fps of the 6900k, as it stands the additional 2 cores over the 6 core CPU aren't worth having.
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You have to keep in mind most review systems are fresh OS installs with nothing going on in the background.
 
All depends what you do on your pc.

Most of my activity makes per core performance king, so the combination of IPC and frequency.

However core count is defenitly useful as allows more multitasking and some games I play make use of multicores.

Note I very rarely play FPS games, and most games I play are not the one's benched by review sites.

e.g. playing lightning returns now, core 0 is 80%+ most of time, other 3 cores under 10%.
 
I seen a fella pointing to a game that only used one core and was 200% faster on an i5 than a Q9650. The thing was. the Q9650 could hit a constant 140FPS. It's pointless to include games that are built like that.
 
jigger said:
You have to keep in mind most review systems are fresh OS installs with nothing going on in the background.
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+1.
This is a very important point which most people don't consider.

Ideally tech sites would test with a preset amount of background tasks although that would throw up other problems. For instance, the most common background tasks are antivirus and it would be hard to get them to behave predictably (deciding to scan something or pulling update etc.). The test site would probably have to run their own update server in closed network or something.
Probably the most repeatable would be have a compression program or something may set to low priority with a list of files to archive from various locations on the disk (not as important for SSDs but still nice to have some random access in there). But even then a more realistic load would be something which comes up ever so often and expects CPU cycles rather than a constant low load.
The other thing is, that if one tech site this and subsequently their scores were different from others it might be hard to explain to readers not paying attention.
 
geordiejc said:
I think you're right about the 6 core. Looking at the average FPS the 6850k 6 core is within 1.6 fps of the 6900k, as it stands the additional 2 cores over the 6 core CPU aren't worth having.

EDIT How much is the r5 1600x rumoured to cost? i know the 6850k is £620, but that price is different from a lot of other online retailers. A 8c Ryzen is still the better buy @ £320 even though it doesn't add more fps over the intel 6c (at present)

my heads mashed thinking about this tbh :)
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Rumours point at around $260 which is around £260 at current exchange rates,and it is a 3.6GHZ to 4.0GHZ part.

We will need to see how IPC pans out in the reviews next week OFC and see if AMD does indeed have a decent IPC core in a range of games.
 
jigger said:
I seen a fella pointing to a game that only used one core and was 200% faster on an i5 than a Q9650. The thing was. the Q9650 could hit a constant 140FPS. It's pointless to include games that are built like that.
Click to expand...

lightning returns can get nowhere near that frame rate ;)

in areas with lots of NPCs it struggles to maintain 30fps on my 4.3ghz clocked haswell, people on amd FX chips are feeling lots of pain with the game, its very cpu bound and focused on one core. It does have at least a second cpu thread running but most of the work is on the first thread. GPU side is fine, I have 4xsgssaa enabled and gpu still is staying below 50% utilisation.

The vast majority of jrpg's are DX9 (not even DX11) and are 1-2 core focused in terms of optimisation.
 
chrcoluk said:
lightning returns can get nowhere near that frame rate ;)

in areas with lots of NPCs it struggles to maintain 30fps on my 4.3ghz clocked haswell, people on amd FX chips are feeling lots of pain with the game, its very cpu bound and focused on one core. It does have at least a second cpu thread running but most of the work is on the first thread. GPU side is fine, I have 4xsgssaa enabled and gpu still is staying below 50% utilisation.
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Your not pushing that 4670 hard enough :p
 
true!
really depends on the application. some executables, whether it is games or programs, prefer more cores over ipc. some other, the opposite.
research the most used app in your system to understand what would be suitable for you
 
chrcoluk said:
lightning returns can get nowhere near that frame rate ;)

in areas with lots of NPCs it struggles to maintain 30fps on my 4.3ghz clocked haswell, people on amd FX chips are feeling lots of pain with the game, its very cpu bound and focused on one core. It does have at least a second cpu thread running but most of the work is on the first thread. GPU side is fine, I have 4xsgssaa enabled and gpu still is staying below 50% utilisation.

The vast majority of jrpg's are DX9 (not even DX11) and are 1-2 core focused in terms of optimisation.
Click to expand...

It would be cheaper to just buy a console for that game!! :p
 
Clockspeed*IPC is king for me; if you crank that up high enough even a single core is good enough, but the converse may not be true (i.e. If you have a slow clockspeed*IPC, even 100 cores may not help).
 
yes as I said their cpu's are weaker.

On the xbox360 the game dips to 5 fps at points :D

Sadly as long as there is bad developers there will be a need for maximised single core performance.
 
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