Tom's Hardware Wants You: CPU Tests For 2011

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RySean

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Personally, as old as it is, I'd still like to see Crysis show up on benchmarks. Although, it's fairly GPU limited, so it may be better suited for GPU benchmarks.

It's still one of the more challenging games to run on even a modern rig...
 

AeroWB

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The software lineup is looking great, the only thing I can think of is to include a very CPU limited game in test, the one that comes to mind is Supreme Commander Forged Alliance. This is a somewhat older game unfortunately, so maybe you know some other game to use instead. With CPU tests the testers almost always use medium resolutions/quality for games to make the test CPU limited instead of GPU limited. However often other limits are reached that cap the FPS then pure CPU power and we see benchmarks were even the budget CPU's hit 60FPS which makes that benchmark not so interesting as it tells you that for that game CPU doesn't really matter, so I would like to see games in CPU test that really struggle to get mote then 60FPS with medium to high end CPU's so that the results really mean something in real life. Now the best way to do that would be to get some very CPU dependent games and second to step up the resolution and graphics quality of the game. This would probably not say much about the real CPU power difference between the CPU's (but we have other tests for that) But it would tell what CPU you really need to get a playable framerate.
 

c_for

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I would like to see Civilization 5 used as a benchmark. The late game can really test a CPU. As an added bonus you could run the same save game file to equalize the tests of different systems and use the time between turns as the test.

In the late game 2000AD+ I usually run about 30 seconds between turns but i've heard people reaching 2 minutes and over.
 
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I would recommand more kind of new ways of juging processors, like with an ecofriendly note and a price/performance score for video and for games.
 
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Good to see CS5 in there as CS4 was really limited on multiple cores. I'd like to see one or two of the more popular DC apps as there are a lot of people who buy with that in mind - personally I'd really like to see Rosetta@home performance in there. You'd need to be a bit clever to run the same unit each time, but it's possible.
 

joytech22

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I think you should include PowerDirector 8, it includes support for multiple threads, can render using graphics cards and the software itself isn't all that expensive, sitting around about $120AUSD.
 

shadowryche

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Have to agree on the Civilization V testing. I've played it on a Phenom II 940 BE and Core i7 920. Both CPU's had been pushed to 90% or higher on the huge maps.
 
I have an issue with iTunes 9.0. It only showcases clock speed, and extreme favoritism for Intel architecture.

In its place, I'd like to see an encoding program that can fully thread itself. I can't name one off top of my head (2:40am) but I know there are some out there.

 

duyturtle

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Get rid of MW2 since pretty much ANY machine could run it at 60FPS+. It's getting up there in the 200 FPS and that tells readers absolutely NOTHING. Switch MW2 for Bad Company 2.

Add BC2, Starcraft 2 and Civ V and the games section would be good to go.

The other software benchmarks are pretty good already, I'd like AutoCAD but that's just me.
 

JonnyDough

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I play a lot of open (non-linear) RPG games on my PC and these can tax a system as much as any FPS due to all the textures and lighting.

i.e. Bethesda games like Oblivion and Dragon Age come to mind.

I would like to see games grouped (and listed in smaller print) into classes, like those that tax CPUs heavily, those that are very heavy on shader use, etc.

I would like a corresponding list of games within that group. For example, "Games heavy on shaders".

Some cards do a lot better for AA than others as well, and some games require more AA to look good than others. If there's some way to group these types of things for us it would be highly beneficial when we are making selections on what to purchase or play with our computers.

Will a 256mb card work for a game like Oblivion? Probably not. But that's really what gamers need to know. Is their system in need of a better video card, CPU, or more memory? Or is the whole thing too slow to realistic work with a game/application.

The same thing could be done for games that require a fast CPU. Some modern games will still run on a 2.0ghz Athlon 64. It would be beneficial and save us money if we are a looking for games that we can still play on our systems without having to upgrade.
 

iLLz

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How about Cinebench R11.5, which I believe is the newest version right now. It also benches the GPU, but the best thing is it benches the CPUs single core, and then all the cores and gives you the multicore speedup.
 

davefb

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You don't actually test any of the tools I use at work or anything similar. I'd be looking at , some sort of source control update (though thats a network test really ;) ), a compilation suite building a big codebase ( so either gcc visual studio or perhaps adobe flash ) and some IDE's that do automated tasks and slow down with big files ( intellij / flash develop / eclipse ).. Oh and yeah civ 5 ;).
 

JonnyDough

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If you have close ties with developers, find out what is coming down the pipes and let us see some sort of short benchmark from some of them. We'd like to know what we can realistically expect our systems to have to be to play games that are coming out in a year's time. That way when we do a new build we can plan better. It would be nice to be able to know if it is worth spending another $40 on another two cores.
 

Cwize1

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Covering the 3D rendering in the benchmarks is good but Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 is an an uber expensive piece of software. The people who use this software (legally) are the type of people who would buy whatever hardware happens to be the most expensive at the time and hence don't need these benchmarks.

A more relevant tool would be blender.
 
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How long the open-source weka data mining functions take on selected KDD datasets ?
 
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