The Tech Report wanted to explore the effect that modern CPUs have on your gaming experience and so they took an XFX Radeon HD 7950 Double Dissipation 3GB with Catalyst 12.3 drivers and paired it with a variety of builds. In order to cover the wide variety of processors available today, they built systems on five different motherboards with 8 different AMD chips and 11 different Intel processors. Then, not only did they test the performance of these various systems while gaming, they also replicated some tests with a video transcoding task in the background to test their multitasking abilities. You can skip to the end of the review and check out the price versus performance graphs but with all the work they put into it you should read the whole article.
"We bring our signature latency-focused game testing methods to bear on the latest crop of desktop CPUs. In the process, we learn a some things and shatter a few popular myths."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Valve Finds Value In Open-Source Drivers; L4D2 Running On Mesa @ Phoronix
- Sleeping Dogs (PC) Review @ Techgage
- Ocs Must Die 2 @ XSReviews
- Guild Wars 2 (PC) Game Review @ HardwareHeaven
- Gamings Finest Moments Horror @ eTeknix
- Spec Ops Lead Hits Out At “Tacked On” Multiplayer @ Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN
- Enemy Yours: Watch An Hour Of The XCOM Remake @ Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN
- A Tad Unusual? Otherland Enters Beta @ Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN
- Win a copy of Damage Inc.: Pacific Squadron WWII @ Hexus
- Sleeping Dogs Xbox 360 @ Tweaktown
- CrazyQuest for iOS – A Fun, Quirky Retro RPG Experience @ Techgage
Just curious why they used
Just curious why they used the 12.3 driver, is that when they started this project?
I’d expect so, that many
I'd expect so, that many benchmarks would take quite a while to complete.
That was one very interesting
That was one very interesting article. It really shows the leap in processing power from generation to generation, and the compounded increase in performance over more than one generation old components.
In games GPU is your
In games GPU is your bottleneck, almost always. In that case no CPU will make a difference. Everything you need for gaming is i3 or Phenom II x4. http://www.computerbase.de/artikel/grafikkarten/2011/bericht-gpu-braucht-cpu-zweiter-teil/6/
The “frame time” metric as
The “frame time” metric as described in this article, and in the related article from TechReport on SLI/Xfire, has tremendous implications for video capture (Fraps etc), I think… very interesting.
Is there a term in computer speak for a timing error where something takes too long to make its regular time slot, and has to wait for the next one? I call it missing the bus, but if there’s an actual term for this I’d like to know it. Whatever it’s called, it can make those occasional “late” frames described in the article cause further cascading delays, especially when capturing video, I think.