Is it time to stop discouraging use of the FX-8350?

[SteveGrabowski0]

For a long time I have been recommending i5s over it. but the FX-8350 is putting in some impressive showings lately. Moar corez looks like it might just be starting to pay off for the 2015 Christmas season and beyond. The writing has been on the wall for the improvement of game paralleization since Watch Dogs and Dragon Age Inquisition, but now it seems like things might have turned a corner in favor of the FX-8350 (and the i7). The recent AAA releases are starting to look pretty good on the FX-8350.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Godlygamer23]

The 8350 also runs at 4GHz base, compared to the 4670K which runs at 3.4GHz. Besides, in some of those benchmarks, including Mad Max and the Battlefront beta, the 8350 ends up doing worse.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Considering how much Unity loved cores, I imagine Syndicate will show a similar pattern.

[SteveGrabowski0]

The 8350 also runs at 4GHz base, compared to the 4670K which runs at 3.4GHz.

 

So what?

[Sauron]

the fx 8350 uses a 4 year old process node on an ultimately inefficient architecture with little platform support for new technologies and only performs all right in a handful of games. Unless you're using it in a server, it's a no-go

[Decon]

yeah I've been considering picking up an 8350 lately for testing

[SteveGrabowski0]

the fx 8350 uses a 4 year old process node on an ultimately inefficient architecture with little platform support for new technologies and only performs all right in a handful of games. Unless you're using it in a server, it's a no-go

 

Handful of games? Those are the major releases so far for the Christmas season. Am I forgetting anything new?

[Godlygamer23]

So what?

If you raise the 4670K's clock or lower the 8350's, the 8350 will likely lose - its architecture overall is inferior.

[Dabombinable]

the fx 8350 uses a 4 year old process node on an ultimately inefficient architecture with little platform support for new technologies and only performs all right in a handful of games. Unless you're using it in a server, it's a no-go

And they are made using the same design found in AMD's server chips-just with half of the modules.

[SteveGrabowski0]

If you raise the 4670K's clock or lower the 8350's, the 8350 will likely lose - its architecture overall is inferior.

 

So what? It runs 4.0 GHz stock. Why would you ever lower it?

[Timmy-P]

The architecture is old.  Good for it that it's at least keeping up all these years, but I wouldn't necessarily say it would be the best choice due to the IPC of those chips moving forward.  I would go on and say how Zen and DX12 could change that, but it's been speculated to hell and back already.  In other words, I wouldn't start placing your bets quite yet, but rather sit back and see how everything pans out over, say, the next year or so.

[Dabombinable]

So what? It runs 4.0 GHz stock. Why would you ever lower it?

Overclock the i5 to 4GHz and it'll smash the FX 8350. Single threaded a 5.3GHz FX 8320 or 8350 can't beat my 3.1GHz i5 4440 at stock. And my i5 consumes less than 40W of power (my i7 is close to its TDP in power consumption) as opposed to the 220W+ needed to get an FX 8350 to 5GHz and higher.

[Godlygamer23]

So what? It runs 4.0 GHz stock. Why would you ever lower it?

My point is that I don't think it's time to stop "discouraging" the 8350. Its performance gains are by and large negligible and in games where a single thread is used, the 4670 will outperform it due to superior single threaded performance.

 

Vishera is inferior to Haswell, Broadwell, and Ivy Bridge. In most areas, it's also inferior to Sandy Bridge.

[SteveGrabowski0]

The architecture is old.  Good for it that it's at least keeping up all these years, but I wouldn't necessarily say it would be the best choice due to the IPC of those chips moving forward.  I would go on and say how Zen and DX12 could change that, but it's been speculated to hell and back already.  In other words, I wouldn't start placing your bets quite yet, but rather sit back and see how everything pans out over, say, the next year or so.

 

This is a pretty nontrivial sampling of games though, lots of different styles of games too. This is a lot different from what these graphs would look like with games just six months ago.

[Majestic]

No, and there hasn't been a reason to stop discouraging it for years.

[Dabombinable]

My point is that I don't think it's time to stop "discouraging" the 8350. Its performance gains are by and large negligible and in games where a single thread is used, the 4670 will outperform it due to superior single threaded performance.

 

Vishera is inferior to Haswell, Broadwell, and Ivy Bridge. In most areas, it's also inferior to Sandy Bridge.

Which is where AMD kind of put their foot in it. They really launched it too early and before they had a good CMT architecture-4 years after launch and most programs barely make use of 4 threads.

[Sauron]

Handful of games? Those are the major releases so far for the Christmas season. Am I forgetting anything new?

 

handful = few. you forget there are past games around too

[SteveGrabowski0]

My point is that I don't think it's time to stop "discouraging" the 8350. Its performance gains are by and large negligible and in games where a single thread is used, the 4670 will outperform it due to superior single threaded performance.

 

Vishera is inferior to Haswell, Broadwell, and Ivy Bridge. In most areas, it's also inferior to Sandy Bridge.

 

But the whole point of the thread is the new stuff so far doesn't seem to be single thread dominated. That the paralleization is starting to become good enough that the extra cores are competing well with the Intel IPC. I'm really surprised by this, I have been a huge advocate of the i5 in this forum for a year now, but the results are starting to show that perhaps developers are getting better splitting loads across multiple threads. I'm pretty excited to see this myself, as this is why I bought a hyperthreaded CPU (Xeon E3-1231v3) a year ago when I saw DAI and Watch Dogs as canaries in the mine, warning that we were going to start seeing good utilization of eight threads. Of course I still bought Intel because I wanted to hedge on that suspicion being wrong so that I'd still have the strong Intel IPC.

[Majestic]

Eventhough i've used GameGPU's results in the past, they make no sense and as a result stopped using them. 5960X can never be above a 4770K in consoleports, not on 3ghz.

[SteveGrabowski0]

handful = few. you forget there are past games around too

 

I'm not forgetting the i5 smashes the FX-8350 in older games. But you can't tell me it's not interesting to see basically every new release looking great on the FX-8350 in these benchmarks.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Eventhough i've used GameGPU's results in the past, they make no sense and as a result stopped using them. 5960X can never be above a 4770K in consoleports, not on 3ghz.

 

Why can it never be? Explain.

[Majestic]

Why can it never be? Explain.

 

Because it's 3ghz, and games aren't that well-threaded. Even on DX12 the 5960X gets beaten by the 6700K.

 

http://www.pcper.com/files/review/2015-08-16/ashesheavy-gtx980.png

[Dabombinable]

I'm not forgetting the i5 smashes the FX-8350 in older games. But you can't tell me it's not interesting to see basically every new release looking great on the FX-8350.

*due to the higher clock speeds and power consumption. AMD's iteration of CMT is still inferior to Intel and AMD's own SMT designs dating back to 2008.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Because it's 3ghz, and games aren't that well-threaded.

 

Games are well threaded now, I almost always see workloads split well across the 8 threads of my E3-1231 when I turn on the RTSS display in newer games. A 5960x has 8 independent cores and has an enormous amount of L3 cache.

[Gas_Mask_]

I think it has been worth it the whole time, and this just adds on to that. Glad to see that more people are seeing that more cores is becoming a giant advantage.