Bulldozer vs Sandybridge performance estimation

[didee12]

Will 8 physical cores be better than 4 physical and four virtual cores, will it help gamers?

 

[jaguarskx]

It won't really help in games because most games are currently designed to run on dual cores. There are many games that can use 3 cores, but there are only a few that can use 4 cores (at least that I know of).

Therefore, under the best current circumstances, 4 of the 8 cores will be wasted when games are concerned. Probably good for video encoding. Those are benchmarks that I would like to see.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

i think bulldozer will live up to its hype, but not for gaming. After 3 cores, majority of games dont scale very well, if at all with additional CPU cores. They will be releasing 4 core bulldozer cpus though. I doubt the per-core performance will be up there with intel SB. AMD are far too late to the game , the bulldozer release pushed back to late september is FAR too late.

 

[Herr_Koos]

It may sound clichéd, but we shall have to wait and see.

 

[AdrianPerry]

It won't really help in games because most games are currently designed to run on dual cores. There are many games that can use 3 cores, but there are only a few that can use 4 cores (at least that I know of).

Therefore, under the best current circumstances, 4 of the 8 cores will be wasted when games are concerned. Probably good for video encoding. Those are benchmarks that I would like to see.

I thought most "big-games" since Crysis were now making the most of QUAD core PC's? Anything involving DX11 especially will see performance increase with 4 cores?

 

[kajabla]

I didn't think Crysis could use 4. The advantage of extra cores is that they take any load that's not game-related off the other cores so they can devote themselves to the game.

 

[jaguarskx]

No game makes "full use of quad core". Meaning of the games that can use quad core, none of them can use 100% of each core. The last time I've read an article about games and quad cores is that going from 3 cores to 4 cores only yielded a small improvement in performance.

 

[AdrianPerry]

No game makes "full use of quad core". Meaning of the games that can use quad core, none of them can use 100% of each core. The last time I've read an article about games and quad cores is that going from 3 cores to 4 cores only yielded a small improvement in performance.

Ah my apologies. I didn't realise you were referring to 100% on each of the cores.

Its a shame really, i've been lurking about the threads based on workstations recently and the general word on there is that alot of the graphics programs are actually much more CPU intensive than GPU intensive. It would be great if games started maxing out on all 4 cores - im sure we could see a great deal of performance increase After all Core 2 Duo is getting rather old Game developers need to take a leap

 

[jaguarskx]

Developing games to use more than two core can also mean increased development cost. The higher the production, the less money can be made unless you are willing to pay more for games than you are currently paying right now.

 

[AdrianPerry]

I could live with a small increase After all PC games are noticeable cheaper RRP than consoles

It would also save me adding another card in SLI so soon

Although obviously I don't want to trigger the trend of increasing prices. The Call of Duty franchise is doing enough of that themselves.

 

[gamerk316]

We already have a sticky for this...

Based on every leaked benchy so far:

A: In applications that scale to 8 cores, BD is faster then even the 990x/2600k
B: In applications that do not scale to 8 cores, BD is about 20% slower then the 990x/2600k

Again, leaked benchies, but they've showed the above two rules consistently for a while now. For gaming, I expect BD to be ~15% slower in non-GPU bottlenecked situations.

 

[Raidur]

The REAL question here is the IPC increase.

There is quite a scary gap between Deneb and Sandy clock for clock in gaming. BD is going to have to come quite a way to be able to price any gaming CPUs profitably and competitively.

Then what happens when Ivy Bridge comes out shortly after and hits 5ghz on air. ><

I pray BD kicks ass, but the difference in IPC and even OC headroom is too too scary against Intel's cheap game-eating monster; $220 i5-2500k.

However I have a feeling they'll get a good amount of customers if those 8 cores aren't too spendy from those using intense multi-core CPU-utilizing or some serious mutli tasking.

 

[kajabla]

AMD could definitely grab the professional media market.