Best CPU for next generation games

[Zain87]

Hello everyone

I'm building a new rig and need your help regarding which cpu on the market right now has a chance of maxing out next generation games and would stay with me for at least 4-5 years, i also plan to get a gtx 780.

And please tell me what you think of this motherboard, Gigabyte GA-B85-HD3 Socket 1150

Thanks!

 

[smorizio]

the b mb are not bad..for a few dollars more get the h81 or h87 for the extra ports. right now the amd fx line is in limbo. leaked screen shots show no new fx cpu next year or any cpu replacing them. next year intel doing the haswell refresh and dropping the haswell e cpus. if you buy a 1150 mb you will be able to drop in one of the newer haswell cpu.

 

[Zain87]

Any idea when intel is going to release their next cpu's? i'll probably start buying the components in april or may, and what do you think of the i7-4770?

 

[oOSlushyOo]

The 4770 is a solid CPU if you are not buying the "K" variant for overclocking purposes (OCing can be tricky on these and will require a solid cooler if you do). The latest Haswell i5 should do more than enough to power you through NextGen and requires a little less coin.

 

[melikepie]

4670(k)/4770(k) are good processors that should last you for a while. Keep in mind though that there are never any promises when it comes to buying hardware; there could be a 100% performance increase for all we know within the next 5 years.

 

[Zain87]

Yeah the i5 still has it of course, but the reason i'm going with i7 is HT and i've heard Crysis 3 make use of that pretty well comparing to other cpu's, so i'm guessing next gen games will be the same. also i dont overclock but i wanna get the K version just in case..

So what do you guys think? get the 4770K or wait for intel's next release? and how long i'm gonna wait?

 

[melikepie]

I wouldn't wait; just get one now if you need it.

 

[oOSlushyOo]

Grab that 4770K now, you will not be disappointed.

 

[melikepie]

Intel has announced that from now on they will put priority on CPUs for mobile devices. From now on, they will release new desktop CPU generations only every other year (as opposed to once a year, as it was in the past). Next generation will be an improved Haswell (but still Haswell), and it will only come for notebooks and tablets. Broadwell will come the year after that.

This is what I read, so from that perspective there is no point in waiting. The background of this decision is probably that a) AMD is no longer a serious competition in the desktop market, so there is no need to keep up the R&D effort and b) the desktop market is mature and rather shrinking, whereas the future lies in the mobile devices.

However, instead of getting a Core i7-4770, I would rather get a Xeon E3-1275 v3. It is also a Haswell, but you have a higher clock speed than the 4770 without the need to overclock, you have more CPU cache than the 4770 for better CPU performance, you have virtualization features which are disabled in any K-processors (overclocking-unlocked processors). The only thing you do not have compared with the 4770 is the useless on-CPU graphics.

Virtualization is actually available on the 4670k and 4770k. Also, the Xeon is about the same price as the 4770k. I still would suggest a 4670k to him though, because it'd last at least a few years (it's risky to say over 3 years for any processor though), and the performance is nearly the same.

 

[melikepie]

I'd just like to add the only difference between the i5 and the i7 (well, the only major difference) is Hyper Threading. It doesn't mean twice the processing power, it just means two threads on one core (think of it like each core has it's own thread, but on the i7 it also has a secondary virtual thread). This is good for some applications. All it really does though is allow two threads to be able to able to share the same core effectively. This shouldn't be a major factor in what you buy unless you plan on using some other applications such as Cinema 4D (Photoshop using the GPU, which a lot of people forget).

 

[oOSlushyOo]

Not a fan boy of this site, but it may help your decision a bit....lots of tech-talk here that you may find confusing:
Xeon E3-1275V3 vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1275-v3-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770K
i5 4670K vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4770K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4670K

Still love the 4770K...own it, and have no complaints.

As for your motherboard, the main thing I would consider is having one that can support 2-way SLI (especially if gaming is your thing). This can, to a degree, allow better game-play with more demanding games in the future (if that's your thaaanng).

 

[melikepie]

Virtualization is actually available on the 4670k and 4770k.

Only partially. Intel VT-x is available, but Intel VT-d is not. The K processors also lack the Intel TSX-NI, vPro, and TXT features. You definitely lose functionality.

Those features give no advantage to any gamer, and the overclock ability of the k processors are much more useful. Those features simply irrelevant to the OP.

 

[Zain87]

Not a fan boy of this site, but it may help your decision a bit....lots of tech-talk here that you may find confusing:
Xeon E3-1275V3 vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1275-v3-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770K
i5 4670K vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4770K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4670K

Still love the 4770K...own it, and have no complaints.

As for your motherboard, the main thing I would consider is having one that can support 2-way SLI (especially if gaming is your thing). This can, to a degree, allow better game-play with more demanding games in the future (if that's your thaaanng).

Thanks that was helpful, i'm still considering the i5 4670K to tell you the truth, but i'm building this rig especially for next-gen games such as Witcher 3, Watch Dogs, etc.. thats why i also considered the i7 4770K. Do you think the i5 would bottleneck the GTX 780 and those games?

 

[melikepie]

Not a fan boy of this site, but it may help your decision a bit....lots of tech-talk here that you may find confusing:
Xeon E3-1275V3 vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Xeon-E3-1275-v3-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770K
i5 4670K vs i7 4770K: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4770K-vs-Intel-Core-i5-4670K

Still love the 4770K...own it, and have no complaints.

As for your motherboard, the main thing I would consider is having one that can support 2-way SLI (especially if gaming is your thing). This can, to a degree, allow better game-play with more demanding games in the future (if that's your thaaanng).

Thanks that was helpful, i'm still considering the i5 4670K to tell you the truth, but i'm building this rig especially for next-gen games such as Witcher 3, Watch Dogs, etc.. thats why i also considered the i7 4770K. Do you think the i5 would bottleneck the GTX 780 and those games?

The i5 wont bottleneck it. Although, just like the i7 you may need to overclock at some point.

 

[melikepie]

You will not need to overclock these games, for the i5-4670 is the fastest gaming CPU you can currently get, and releasing a game that does not run smoothly on even such a CPU would be more than silly from the manufacturer's standpoint (who will rather endeavor to make sure it runs on as many CPUs as possible so that a wider circle of potential customers will buy it). Of course, CPUs will get even more powerful in the future, so in a few years any CPU can become a bottleneck. However, the development speed of desktop processors has significantly slowed down. Intel plans on releasing a new one only every other year from now on. So this time will not be anytime soon.

The K processors also lack the Intel TSX-NI, vPro, and TXT features. You definitely lose functionality.

Those features give no advantage to any gamer, and the overclock ability of the k processors are much more useful. Those features simply irrelevant to the OP.

I have yet to see a person who uses her PC for only one purpose ever. I am also gaming on my PC 95% of the time, but that does not mean I do not occasionally experiment with unknown software in a sandbox during the remaining 5%.

VPro and TXT are security features rarely used, and are certainly NOT something required by any means. And TXT is an instruction set for Haswell, and for the most part there is virtually no software that exists that would use it (not a major selling point, plus nobody targets a single type of processor that most people don't have).

 

[melikepie]

Same goes for AVX, so AVX is also irrelevant then? Has it ever occurred to you that these are new extensions for future software and that every future Intel CPU in the years to come will support it, probably followed by AMD, up to the level of these extensions being available in most CPUs?

I agree concerning Vpro, that is mainly for company remote administration, but vt-d is relevant when you run e.g. VirtualBox.

AVX is never used in game development, and most applications don't support it due to compatibility issues.

 

[melikepie]

Next gen games will most likely be powered by Mantle seeing just how much of an increase in performance it offers, plus AMD is powering every console that matters (PS4,XBONE,WII-2?). It also means more cores = better scaling == better performance.

Here's a screenshot from an independent studio working with Mantle on an un-optimized engine. Notice the line that reads FX-8350.
That's a $200 cheaper processor btw.

I agree with AMD that Mantle is not a terrible idea, but it wont be the future. Having a GCN bound API is horrible. Plus, the overhead for DirectX is too low to matter. Of course AMD wants to say the performance difference is huge, but it just cant. You also have to consider that lots of people have NVIDIA cards too, which could really drive the API south.

 

[melikepie]

It's not GCN bound though, it'll work with nvidia cards as well =) AMD are not the ones that say the overhead on DX is huge, it's the developers.

I looked up a bit more and Mantle sounds like another version of OpenGL (nothing to do with it, but like it).

 

[Lessthannil]

The I5-4670k is good. Even though games are supporting more threads and cores does not mean the FX 8 will surpass the Core i5 series. Games are not completely paralell; some tasks need to stay on one core for a multitude of reasons.

Sure, the FX 8 series looks better than the in synthetic benchmarks, but this doesn't mean much at all. Synthetic benchmarks dont provide real work. They load each core with the same work as another. This just isn't useful because load balancing in games will never be perfect.

The fact of the matter is that games will use more cores, but you still need good per core performance. You just can't throw that away like the FX series did.

The 4770k will still only be useful if you do multithreaded tasks. HT only uses double precision floating point caculations IIRC, which is very rarely used in games. The FPS boost over the 4670k may be coming from somewhere else, and even still, is hardly worth paying $100 more over for just games.

I'm not trying to bag on the FX series. They are really good for the price and I realize that some people cant justify buying Intel over them.

Addendum: Get the FX 8320 if you want to save some money.

 

[melikepie]

The I5-4670k is good. Even though games are supporting more threads and cores does not mean the FX 8 will surpass the Core i5 series. Games are not completely paralell; some tasks need to stay on one core for a multitude of reasons.

Sure, the FX 8 series looks better than the in synthetic benchmarks, but this doesn't mean much at all. Synthetic benchmarks dont provide real work. They load each core with the same work as another. This just isn't useful because load balancing in games will never be perfect.

The fact of the matter is that games will use more cores, but you still need good per core performance. You just can't throw that away like the FX series did.

The 4770k will still only be useful if you do multithreaded tasks. HT only uses double precision floating point caculations IIRC, which is very rarely used in games. The FPS boost over the 4670k may be coming from somewhere else, and even still, is hardly worth paying $100 more over for just games.

I'm not trying to bag on the FX series. They are really good for the price and I realize that some people cant justify buying Intel over them.

Addendum: Get the FX 8320 if you want to save some money.

The FX is terrible at anything and everything that doesn't make use of all it's cores. Games still run smooth, but still it has too poor of performance to really be suggested for someone. For a GTX 780 though, an FX is one of the worst possible ways to give up performance.