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

[Darkman]

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).

I agree. They are lacking in the CPU department as well for sure.

[BurgerBum]

soooo....

whats new?

 

 

we've known this for a while.

basically buy nvidia or amd and dont cheap out on an i3. i3's are poision for gaming. 

mid level i5 and a 280 kicks ass. 

[BurgerBum]

I agree. They are lacking in the CPU department as well for sure.

i also agree. 

i do hope that they release either a new line or cazziro as the new primary high end CPU line.

i have high hopes for cazziro, just cause its an APU doesnt mean its not good for a standalone cpu, and seeing what all kaveri could do with their non-cpu cores in thsoe chips im quite excited.

 

also, 390X YOU BETTER GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE ASAP

[BurgerBum]

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. 

yup.

 

i want either more affordable i5s to come out (without dropping preformance, hell, make a gamer line if you have to, drop the integrated gpu and just push a 6 core i5 at 150$, its not that hard. really.)

, or for some more love on the athlon line to happen.

 

the athlon x4 760K and 860K are great chips for the price. 

[patrickjp93]

yup.

 

i want either more affordable i5s to come out (without dropping preformance, hell, make a gamer line if you have to, drop the integrated gpu and just push a 6 core i5 at 150$, its not that hard. really.)

, or for some more love on the athlon line to happen.

 

the athlon x4 760K and 860K are great chips for the price. 

The whole world is moving towards heterogeneous computing. Standalone CPUs are dead both for Intel and AMD after 2018 I guarantee it. Iris Pro 5200 has more compute power than the 4 CPU cores themselves have, by a ton more than what you'd gain by putting in 2 more CPU cores. Serial computing (which is what CPU cores are good at) is only ever going to get so fast. The future is parallel, and both major chip makers have accepted that and are building on it.

 

That requires a big paradigm shift in the programming world. If games used iGPU acceleration for physics and AI neural networks, you'd have some BADASS games right now, but to get that skill in the games industry means the scientific computing community practically has to find that level of skill beneath them.

[Lord Baal]

I don't really buy this. I don't even consider i3 to be a low end cpu, probably a mid tier one. This just shows that AMD needs to get their sht together in the driver department, because as far as i remember nvidia launched a driver few months ago to reduce the cpu overhead and stuff like that.

 

So to summ it up, it's not the CPU problem, it's the AMD drivers.

Or maybe you need to wake up and start considering I3's as the cheap low end CPU they're and are intended to be.

Not saying AMD don't have driver issues how ever because clearly they do but there's no arguing that I3's are low end cpu's.

[Qub3d]

Strange. I use an R9 280 and an i5 to game in 1080p - I get 60 FPS in new AAA titles, and well over 120 in MMOGs and older FPSers.  I feel like we need more information about the hardware being used in these tests.

[xAcid9]

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;

 

 

Both site need to re-test it with 14.11.x beta driver that have optimization for COD:AW imo, the Geforce driver was optimized for COD:AW but not the Catalyst driver.