CPU/GF/Radeon

[tbirdXPplus]

ot something to ask. i`ve recently heard something about Geforces are very sensitive to the speed of the CPU, while Radeons are much less CPU dependent. the guy who told me this said sometihng about with a p4 2.0, the GF4 Ti is better than radeon8500, but with a p3-600, radeon 8500 will show faster performance in games.

this may be useless to discuss because who would use a Rad8500 on a p3? (sorry if anyone out there is doing this)

what matters is after 2,3 years, when CPUs are much more faster, outdated GF4 Ti may be still useful, while the radeon(if it is true that it is pretty much independent from the CPU performance) might need a upgrade.


i experienced something like this. with a tbird 1.4@1.6 and a outdated matrox g450 16SDR, games like high heat baseball would run fine(it didn`t when i used a p2-450)

Be nice.

 

[Oracle]

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt that any particular card is CPU dependant or not. What makes a difference is the engine of the game. For example, the UT engine goes after the CPU, while the Q3 engine will bark at the graphics card.
To be able to play any given game at good rates, it is best to have both a good CPU and graphics card.


<font color=red>A platform is not an oil rig.</font color=red>

 

[Myrmecophagavir]

For a good article on modern GPU/CPU scaling, read AnandTech's recent one:

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1650" target="_new">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1650</A>

You can see that on high detail settings (who would be using anything else with this setup?) the Radeon 8500 curve flattens out about the 1.2 GHz mark, which is about where Pentium IIIs end. So you might argue that the top of the line P3 was indeed where the Radeon is at its most useful.

Exactly the same is true of the GeForce 3s - their performance maxes out after the 1.2 GHz mark.

But you can see the GeForce 4 Tis keep climbing with CPU speed - so you're right that the GF4 Ti would be more useful in the future than an 8500.

However it's a bit of an uneven comparison, the 8500 was designed to compete with the GF3 Ti 500, not any of the GF4s, so you'd naturally expect that result.