AMD GPUs can be massively bottlenecked by low end CPUs[COD: AW] [Digital Foundry]

[Sharkyx1]

I highly suspect that this is a Driver issue, not a design flaw in their GPU's. If it was a design flaw, we'd see the issue more frequently with other games.

Well i don't think it would really make sense for this to be a hardware problem, DF says it seems they are running into issues where a lot of draw calls are made, so driver overhead sounds like the most likely cause.

[Guest Kloaked]

They run a 760 on an i7 and an i3 as well as a R9 280 on both

The 760 has minimal performance drop, the 280 is halved whenever anything dramatic is on screen

Oh okay. I was confused by the other replies for a second. I took the replies out of context, so I was sitting here confused about what the video was about, haha

[ivan134]

hmm odd as my i3 + 7870xt(basically a 280) seems to go very well in most games, when i throw my i5 into the mix ill see how much of difference i get

A 280 is a rebadged 7950.

[brownninja97]

A 280 is a rebadged 7950.

go look up 7870 xt, then consider my card is heavily overclocked like 1400mhz kinda clocks so yeah it balances out in the end. 

[Misanthrope]

Well, I don't actually own CoD: AW because fuck P2P multiplayer that's why, but I currently have this exact setting: an i3 4150 paired with a 290x and so far the only thing I've had to turn down to not max out everything was the grass mods on Skyrim

So assuming this is even conclusive, there's 1 game vs Farcry 4 claiming it wouldn't work on dual core cpus when it actually does. Not sure guys, it smells like BS to me, once again trying to pad out game requirements artificially to appear more next gen, something Activision is not above doing with this very franchise as it was the case for the bullshit requirements on Ghosts.

[Sharkyx1]

go look up 7870 xt, then consider my card is heavily overclocked like 1400mhz kinda clocks so yeah it balances out in the end. 

we all know what the 7870XT is its a cut down Tahiti with a 256 bus and 1536 cores

that card really should have been called 7930, but i guess amd didn't want to make any 30 cards?

anyways 280 is 1792 core w/256 bus

[brownninja97]

we all know what the 7870XT is its a cut down Tahiti with a 256 bus and 1536 cores

that card really should have been called 7930, but i guess amd didn't want to make any 30 cards?

anyways 280 is 1792 core w/256 bus

hmm 200 extra cores versus +400 clock speed +200 memory clock. 

 

My 7870xt is a golden chip, it out performs the 7950 in many games consider that back when i was offensive with my clocks i used an i3. Now i use an i5 @4.3ghz so yeah its awesome.

[SteveGrabowski]

I highly suspect that this is a Driver issue, not a design flaw in their GPU's. If it was a design flaw, we'd see the issue more frequently with other games.

 

Yeah, I think so too. I have always heard Nvidia has lower driver overhead so is better in CPU limited situations, but I have never seen anything like that where the superior AMD card gets half the framerate.

[Psykomantis00]

One game that just came out has issues if you don't have a decent cpu? Wow guys, who would have thought that a game that recently came out and hasn't have a driver update for it yet would run slightly less better on a low end cpu? Somebody better tell Obama!

[Sharkyx1]

One game that just came out has issues if you don't have a decent cpu? Wow guys, who would have thought that a game that recently came out and hasn't have a driver update for it yet would run slightly less better on a low end cpu? Somebody better tell Obama!

The thing thats interesting here is is the huge difference between AMD and Nvidia with the same CPU. your argument would work better if the nvidia card had issues too, but this basically says if you have a low end cpu its better to get a 750ti than a 290X even if money is no object

[RexinOridle]

"Bottleneck" AMD. Why don't your upgrade your CPU line AMD?

[xAcid9]

Want to see a retest with the new Catalyst Omega driver coming this Monday and hopefully they use more game to test.

[Faa]

Well I said it a lot; Mantle is only doing great against their own Directx but doing a lil bit better than Nvidia's DX. Their drivers cause tons of CPU overhead being the reason why theyre like at half of nvidia's performance because the CPU holded them back. The driver 337.50 adressed a large amount of overhead and after a year AMD still didn't respond rather than gimmicking Mantle all over the place.





Seeing a 50% difference between a 980 & 290x with a 5960x is far from what it should be.

Another one;

[Psykomantis00]

The thing thats interesting here is is the huge difference between AMD and Nvidia with the same CPU. your argument would work better if the nvidia card had issues too, but this basically says if you have a low end cpu its better to get a 750ti than a 290X even if money is no object

If money is not a concern you wouldn't have a shit cpu to begin with. 

[Sharkyx1]

If money is not a concern you wouldn't have a shit cpu to begin with. 

of course not, but the example was to show something like: how you could mistakenly upgrade your GPU from a 750 to an AMD card, and get worse performance. 

[Humbug]

They should do a follow up testing a variety of games.

Need to establish whether or not this is limited to COD Advanced Warfare.

[D3MON]

Source of this "MUCH better performance" please. 

 

In the vast majority of games, an i3 will beat an FX 6300. 

in those single threaded games a pentium k will beat an i3...

[79wjd]

in those single threaded games a pentium k will beat an i3...

I'm not denying that a G3258 is better for single and dual threaded games (assuming you're just gaming and not multitasking), all I'm saying is an i3 beats an FX6300 in most games -- even in games that can use four+ threads. 

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i3-4340-4330-4130_5.html#sect0

[D3MON]

I'm not denying that a G3258 is better for single and dual threaded games (assuming you're just gaming and not multitasking), all I'm saying is an i3 beats an FX6300 in almost all games -- even in games that use four threads. 

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

the first result on google is tech spot, well threaded game an i3 is equal to an fx6 that said so is everything, this is obviously not a cpu test, its safe to say in a threaded game 4 decent threads+ will all perform a like, of course heavily threaded cpu tests are different.

as for single threaded games

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2014/06/24/intel-pentium-g3258-review/5

all you have to do is read reviews of new products like most enthusiasts do and read between the lines and you can work things out.

this is well known by people on the forum hence so many people have bought the pentium k, "it performs equally to a 4790k in lots of games" and for those games they're right, if you need more power an i5 is 2x the cpu for 3x the cost.

in my experience most games that are single threaded i, e core 0 is pinned at 100% and the game couldnt give a toss otherwise, some games are worthless multi-threaded i.e core 0 is pinned at 100% and core 1 is at 20% and other threads are still at 0%, then you get badly threaded games where core 0=80%, 1=20%, 3=50%, 4=5% these are the only games an i3 or fx4 might be worthwhile though id never personally do it because an fx6 of low end i5 is usually only slightly more, then you get well threaded games that evenly use threads where on an fx8/4690k will have either every thread used equally or every "full" core is used even when talking about phenom2 x6's and 4930k where you'll clearly see it evenly used, these are best case scenarios and require game devs to do thier job, unfortunately devs are people and can be lazy but that doesnt mean we should keel over and focus on single core performance, those days are behind us and while still important i highly doubt intels going to be able to double the IPC of say sandy bridge after 10 years (2021) especially not while maintaining equal clock-ability, even if they could double performance per clock they wouldnt be able to hit 5ghz so the performance is reaching its limits and the only thing to do is to reduce power (which they are) and go lateral with more cores (which on the high end/pro market they are). the signs are there.

[79wjd]

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

the first result on google is tech spot, well threaded game an i3 is equal to an fx6 that said so is everything, this is obviously not a cpu test, its safe to say in a threaded game 4 decent threads+ will all perform a like, of course heavily threaded cpu tests are different.

as for single threaded games

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2014/06/24/intel-pentium-g3258-review/5

all you have to do is read reviews of new products like most enthusiasts do and read between the lines and you can work things out.

this is well known by people on the forum hence so many people have bought the pentium k, "it performs equally to a 4790k in lots of games" and for those games they're right, if you need more power an i5 is 2x the cpu for 3x the cost.

I'm not denying the performance of a G3258 in single or dual threaded games....I understand thats it's an amazing choice for single and dual threaded games, but it becomes a terrible choice once you start playing games that use more than two cores (bf4 for example).

 

And that first link uses an ivy i3, not a Haswell i3; a Haswell i3 would perform even better. 

[patrickjp93]

Hopefully with Zen AMD moves to DDR4 and PCIe 4 and we can put the dead platforms to rest. FM3 With 32-48 PCIe lanes supported, the strength of Ivy Bridge, and the GCN 1.3 architecture would make AMD a platform of the people who don't want to deal with Intel's price gouging for their purposes.

[blAckspAde]

We already knew this. That's one of the big reasons Mantle was created -- to alleviate CPU bottlenecks.

Yup nailed it.

 

This also seems very thrown together. With more CPUs and different graphics cards and games you could get a better idea if this is a result of the AMD software/hardware stacks, or just an isolated case.

[blAckspAde]

Yeah! what the guy i quoted abive said. I cant believe i fucked up quoting somebody (facepalm).

[Darkman]

And this is the exact reason AMD developed and is working on Mantle. Some people don't have much money for a computer and Mantle is a nice work around depending on what games you play.

[patrickjp93]

And this is the exact reason AMD developed and is working on Mantle. Some people don't have much money for a computer and Mantle is a nice work around depending on what games you play.

Don't get me wrong: I'm all for optimizing software to better leverage all hardware resources, but AMD also needs to bring the hardware ffs... (CPU side anyway).