MattDaemontools

Even the mods which are purported to demand a faster CPU run excellent on the FX 8320. The lighting mods for example, the grass mods, water mods and the snow mods just to name a few aren't as CPU heavy as you would imagine because they're sufficiently multi-threaded. They also require a lot of GPU horsepower tipping the equation back in favor of the GPU, so the game becomes more GPU bound. Which does end up meaning that a $130 FX 8320 with a modest overclock is really all you need to mod Skyrim to the moon.
Simply put once you mod Skyrim for better graphics it will always end up being GPU bound so long as you're running a decent multicore CPU like an i5 or an eight core FX. The older dual cores will struggle.
 

Well guys I've been doing my own research & analysis of the performance of AMD & Intel CPUs for sometime, I did not do tests personally however I tried to salvage as much knowledge as possible to try and answer a question that has been on my mind, which is how far ahead Intel really is? and that question led me to some very interesting realizations.

The discussion will be highly technical and might seem boring to some, I'll start off with the basics & end with the answer to the original question plus several others.

Ok let's begin, first off our discussion will be surrounding AMD's modular Bulldozer/Piledriver architecture & Intel's core series from Westmere to Sandy/Ivy & Haswell.

The Architectures : AMD Bulldozer/Piledriver

The building block of AMD's modular architecture is not an x86 core, it's an x86 module, this module contains everything that a core contains but with a number of components doubled, these components include the integer scheduler, its datapath, 16KB of L1 DCache & it's own load/store unit.
The doubling of these components is what gives the AMD module essentially two cores/threads.
The integer cores share the early pipeline stages (e.g. L1i, fetch, decode), the floating point unit, and the L2 cache with the rest of the module.


 
How this affects performance
Depending on the workload the quad module eight core AMD processors can either perform as eight processing units or as four and this depends entirely on the affinity of the workload to integer or floating point calculations.
If integer calculations are needed there are eight integer pipelines that can be used, however if floating point calculations are needed there are only four.

No need for that, I know what I'm talking about

A lot. I had that cpu and it even bottlenecked a 9600gt in some games. Get a cheap core 2 quad and an r9 270.

I don't think many will opt for refunds but I certainly believe that Nvidia's reputation has been irreversibly damaged by this scandal.
Either way you slice it, it looks awful for Nvidia. Because it either means they deliberately lied bout the specifications of the GTX 970 or that their marketing team is so hopelessly incompetent as to make such an "error". And frankly I don't know which is worse.

but its stuttering because of the .5GB of slow ram and nvidia didnt tell anyone that it was 3.5GB of regular ram then .5GB of slow ram so people thought they were getting a full 4GB card. sure it is still a great performing card but how can we trust nvidia in the future now. if they say the 980 ti has 5000 cuda cores how do we know they dont have 1000 full cuda cores then 4000 cuda cores running at 1mhz

What do you mean insinuate ? it's just the reality mr moose. The memory issue isn't reflected in FPS in benchmarks but in stutters in frame consistency. Something which is detectable through Nvidia's own FCAT. Something which only came to light when this memory issue was brought into question.
I can't believe I'm attacked because I'm asking for a 4GB card as advertised. 
Nvidia misrepresented their product,  I may not buy from them again, I may take my card back, but don't try to insinuate that this is a non-issue or that AMD does this to the same extent as Nvidia.

Source via PCPer
 
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation/4
It appears this is a classic case of false advertising. Nvidia's marketing team has been known to stretch the truth with their marketing in the past. For instance claiming a 165W TDP for the GTX 980 (which is false) to claim a 2X perf/watt boost over Kepler.

 
Another example is advertising the Tegra X1 chip as a 1TFLOP "supercomputer" when in fact they're using half precision peak FP16 performance figures. A performance metric which was abandoned from Shader model 3.0 onwards and utterly unsuitable for a "supercomputer" which not only requires FP32 but even more so double precision FP64 compute. In which the Tegra X1 can only deliver less than 2% of the advertised compute performance.

This is what happens when you let marketing morons go wild. The 980 isn't a 165W card and the 970 can't use all of its VRAM properly. Also what the frack is wrong with Nvidia saying the Tegra X1 is a 1TFlop chip when they are actually counting the 16bit half precision performance which was abandoned over a decade ago. When in fact the single percision FP32 performance is 500GFlops at PEAK, so not even when it goes into actual products with real-world thermal and power limits.

This is what happens when you let marketing morons go wild. The 980 isn't a 165W card and the 970 can't use all of its VRAM properly. Also what the frack is wrong with Nvidia saying the Tegra X1 is a 1TFlop chip when they are actually counting the 16bit half precision performance which was abandoned over a decade ago. When in fact the single percision FP32 performance is 500GFlops at PEAK, so not even when it goes into actual products with real-world thermal and power limits.

Sorry but I am not letting Nvidia off the hook for this one.  The GTX 970 should be using all of the 4 GB of memory when you need it and when people with some cards can't do it they deserve a refund.

The general manager of AMD's computing and graphics business unit revealed some fascinating information in a recent interview.
 

The AMD executive states that AMD is actively working on making APUs and GPUs talk to each other beyond simple dual graphics for better performance.
AMD also states they do care very much about x86 CPU performance, in fact it's one of their top priorities. The GM also talked about AMD's new found interest in software and emphasized the importance of GPU drivers giving the recent AMD Catalyst Omega driver as an example. According to the GM the new restructuring and cost cutting efforts were done to secure more fund to go into research and development.
 
These are excerbs from the interview which you can find in the full article. AMD also talked about Carrizo, virtual reality and working on next generation "leadership" graphics products among other things.

Only it actually isn't awful at all. In fact it's the most power efficient professional GPU in the world, Topping the Green500 list. And in gaming it's marginally (20-30W) behind the competition.
 



http://www.techspot.com/review/885-nvidia-geforce-gtx-970-gtx-980/page7.html

I'm pretty sure they're talking about the future. As in with the new Zen core by the legendary Jim Keller.

Company's don't really create hype, it's the people, the fans and media that do.
AMD's previous CEO Rory Read admitted that Bulldozer was a failure, even though it was not conceived under his tenure. He brought in Mark Papermaster who in turn brought in Jim Keller the designer of the first ever 64bit x86 CPU and the original Athlons that beat out intel. He knows what he's doing.
Bulldozer aside, Hawaii was a phenomenal success for AMD. It was smaller, better performing and more capable for professional compute applications than the GTX Titan, yet it was prices at half. Even a year later it was still going strong.

I wouldn't pay much if any attention to synthetics, especially unigine based since those favor Nvidia. If you're getting a good performance improvement in games then there's nothing to fret over.

Well i wasnt talking about FX cpu´s, but intel cpu´s
But at 4k the cpu doesnt realy make much sense anymore.
Intel scales better yeah sure,
But at 1080p also intel bottlenecks dual highend gpu´s badly.
 
Also i realy dont care about synthetic benchmarks.

It isn't surprising, considering AMD has maintained a significant lead with GCN over Nvidia's Kepler and Maxwell in compute performance, especially compute per watt.
And supercomputers are all about compute.

Perhaps many of you are familiar with Hawaii, the venerable GPU powering the fastest graphics card in the world the R9 295X2 along with AMD's enthusiast R9 290x and R9 290 offerings.
So it may come as a shock to you to hear that this GPU is in fact the most power efficient General Purpose GPU in the world to date.
 
GSI Helmholtz Center's latest super computer the L-CSC is the first ever to break the 5 gigaflops/watt barrier. Powered by AMD's FirePro S9150 accelerator based on the Hawaii GPU, L-CSC has earned the #1 spot in the latest Green500 list of the most power efficient supercomputers in the world.
 

 
The previous #1 spot holder the TSUBAME-KFC powered by Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs and Nvidia K20 GPU accelerators fell into third position. Capable of 4.4 gigaflops/watt, compared to the AMD powered L-CSC which is capable of 5.27 gigaflops/watt.
 
Source
 
said David Cummings, senior director and general manager, professional graphics, AMD.
 
said Professor Dr. Volker Lindenstruth, professor at Goethe University of Frankfurt, head of IT department of GSI, and chairman of Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies.
Source #2

Both cards are equivalent to an HD 7870 2GB card. the 1.25GB of memory on the GTX 570 frankly has no place in today's games. You will definitely run out of memory playing a lot of games and that's going to be a horrible stuttery experience.

I didn't see all this wccf hate when they were leaking 900 series info...double standard much ? :blink: :blink: :blink:

No, people here definitely bash the AMD related wccf news.
No one said a thing about how "horrible" wccf is when they leaked the 980 and 970 prices. Double standard at its finest.
http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/217044-gtx-980-and-gtx-970-prices-revealed-549-and-329/

I didn't see all this wccf hate when they were leaking 900 series info...double standard much ? :blink: :blink: :blink:

I didn't see all this wccf hate when they were leaking 900 series info...double standard much ? :blink: :blink: :blink:

I didn't see all this wccf hate when they were leaking 900 series info...double standard much ? :blink: :blink: :blink: