Why Benchmarking CPUs with the GTX 1080 Ti is NOT STUPID!

[gavinh87]

Reading back a little. The old chestnut of quad is fine etc.

I've got a rig here, Titan x (Maxwell) 32gb @2666 with a 5960x installed. If you want me to do some benches with a 5930k in the same rig I will. I've gotta good few games to choose from.

That would be interesting, same clockspeed?

 

[oweneades]

Out of pure hilarity, I might actually test my new (to me) 1080Ti in the "retro" Core 2 Quad system I am building (QX6850 based).

Should be a laugh seeing how much (or not...?!) it bottlenecks in a mixture of titles (compared to my 8700K).

I am going to hasten a guess that the answer will be between, "quite a lot" and "lol, oh dear". Happy to be surprised though.

 

[gavinh87]

Out of pure hilarity, I might actually test my new (to me) 1080Ti in the "retro" Core 2 Quad system I am building (QX6850 based).

Should be a laugh seeing how much (or not...?!) it bottlenecks in a mixture of titles (compared to my 8700K).

I am going to hasten a guess that the answer will be between, "quite a lot" and "lol, oh dear". Happy to be surprised though.

Every single game I'm guessing. But it should be fun!

 

[oweneades]

Yep although I imagine it will be a tad faster than the Athlon 64 3800+ system I was playing with until that started to have a tantrum and stopped working....

It had a PCI-E slot... I could have put the 1080ti in that.... (Not that it would have worked mind given the lack of bios support and well, the 250w PSU...)

 

[HangTime]

Agree but i would add that 4 core CPU's are fine for the very budget minded, anything more than a GTX 1050TI and you will have a pretty horrible experience, i had to run Insurgency, great game but how old is it? i had to run it 4K DSR to tame my GPU power balance because the 4.5Ghz 4690K could not keep up, and even then it was stuttery, anything less than 4K it was a _______ mess with all 4 cores permanently locked to 100%, it was like trying to play the game while running Cinebench in the background.

4 Cores are dead for anything above GTX 1050TI.

I'm not convinced, plenty of games around that will really tax a 1060 3GB or similar at high resolution on a fast clocked quad. I have a hex core but it is very much the minority of games I've played where the cpu is well utilised - Battlefield 1 and maybe one or two others.

q6600 was launched back in 2007 - quadcore. It took 10 years, until 2017, for quadcore to be surpassed in mainstream desktop scenarios, by hex cores and above.

It took 1 year to move from hexcore to octacores to 16 cores and above, for mainstream desktop scenarios.

Developers WILL utilise more cores sooner than later.

As for the general point about games getting more optimised for additional cores over time, it's important to remember that it gets progressively harder to do this the more cores we keep adding into the mix because you need to start creating more and more threads that are demanding on cpu and avoiding having a couple of 'heavy' threads. I just think most games are hard to parallelise compared to productivity apps.

I can see potentially stuff like more cores being used to do better AI or better Physics (with a shift away from PPU); I imagine we'll see cpus letting us do more things at the same speed rather than the same things more quickly. Kinda like having 9 women giving birth to 9 children in 9 months, rather than 1 child in 1 month. The raw bottlenecks that come when you have a small number of threads spiking to massively hungry levels are much harder to treat because you need raw clockspeed/ipc on the relevant core(s).