Do The Meltdown and Spectre Patches Affect PC Gaming Performance? 10 CPUs Tested

[steve15180]

I suppose, but it's a distinction without a difference. If a program runs, but dosen't give any results, it's no better than a program that dosen't run. If spectre 2 runs,
but dosen't reveal any memory locations, what's the point? Besides, as of yesterday, NO spectre 2 code has worked on Zen, out of hundreds of tries. Which is kind of the pont.

 

[BoredErica]

So this test does not include KB4078130?

 

[icycool_q1]

This article is pretty much useless, most people don't own latest gen CPUs, and well, lots of us are sticking to Win7 for eternity.

I have an i7 4930K with HT disabled to get higher clock count and avoid affinity issues.
After downloading the windoze (auto) update patch for this, the system was noticably slower, so slow infact, I could see desktop windows building before my eyes.
I went along to Gibson Research and downloaded the InSpectre app, works great and allowed me to disable the "patches", system back to excellence.
No BIOS updates were applied, and given the problems those have had, I don't think I'd ever risk it for the perceived benefit.

 

[STbob]

Agreed. Toms Hardware dropped the ball on this one. Maybe intel dropped them a note not to test the old cpus. Test them all!
- Westmere
- Sandy
- Ivy
- Haswell

All those cpus are still being used by gamers. i7s have not got that much faster in 10 years. I'm runing Ivy on a 3610 workstation Xeon 1660 4Gz hex core. Its plenty fast and does have the bios patch for Spectre.

 

[STbob]

Agreed. Toms Hardware dropped the ball on this one. Maybe intel dropped them a note not to test the old cpus. Test them all!
- Westmere
- Sandy
- Ivy
- Haswell

All those cpus are still being used by gamers. i7s have not got that much faster in 10 years. I'm runing Ivy on a 3610 workstation Xeon 1660 4Gz hex core. Its plenty fast and does have the bios patch for Spectre.

 

[alsmith]

2 months on..... looking for the tests on older cpus...... still looking.......

 

[STbob]

I tested my Hex core Ivy Dell 3610 + Gtx 1080 and it dropped around 10-12 fps in cinbench with the spectre bios patch. I turned both patches off using insprectre app.

Not worth the downgrade in performance Even though it was only 10 fps the system seems more responsive with them off. I would like to see someone do extensive benchmarks on games and applications using Sandy ivy and Haswell. Its very strange how all these hardware sites only test on Skylake or newer. Yet they somehow have plenty of benchmarks on those older systems before spectre patches.

I see no compelling reason to change my hex core xeon @ 4ghz to anything newer.