AMD FX-8150 Multi-GPU Gameplay Performance Review @ [H]

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

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AMD FX-8150 Multi-GPU Gameplay Performance Review - We are taking the new AMD FX-8150 and giving it the power of Dual and Triple-SLI GeForce GTX 580 video cards. We are going to take the new CPU up to large NV Surround resolutions and see how performance stacks up when it comes to high-end gaming scenarios.
 
I was so hoping the Bulldozer was going to rock it a bit...

Guess I'm waiting a little long for it to mature.
 
Wow - the failboat has pulled into dock on this one. This again reaffirmed my decision to get a 2500k instead of waiting for bulldozer.
 
[RIP]Zeus;1037971681 said:
I was so hoping the Bulldozer was going to rock it a bit...

Guess I'm waiting a little long for it to mature.
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That would have been wishful thinking at best. We've seen nothing to indicate Bulldozer would be especially good at anything compared to Sandy Bridge, Sandy Bridge-E or Ivy Bridge. Well perhaps encoding, but that's about it. It may be compelling for owners of AM3 / AM3+ motherboards since that's the only upgrade path they have after Phenom II. I'm sure those stuck in that upgrade path (without spending the cash on an Intel chipset based board) wish it was better, but wishing for a thing does not make it so.
 
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conclusion=bulldozer still sucks
You can slap "FX" all over the architecture as much as you like but it will still only be fit for mainstream use.
 
Bulldozer architecture = Train wreck

Bulldozer-fail.jpg


AMD's stock may have gone up recently because of their above expectations quarterly earnings and demand for their APU's

SELL SELL SELL!!!

%5BH%5DardOCP%20fail.jpg
 
It would be interesting to see results on CF too - Nvidia SLI tends to require more CPU power in games.
 
Michaelius said:
It would be interesting to see results on CF too - Nvidia SLI tends to require more CPU power in games.
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This is just speculation but if anything I think we'd see Bulldozer do a little better with Crossfire and CrossfireX than it does with SLI, but this certainly represents a case for the most demanding setup. In which case you need to look toward Intel if you need the performance. I don't think adding Crossfire / CrossfireX into the mix would change the outcome of the evaluation.
 
I love AMD and really wanted BD to kick ass. Honestly. When I built a 1090T AMD system mid 2010 and OC'd it to around 3.9ghz stable, the games I was playing at the time seemed "sluggish". This was coming from an older Intel 920. After msybe 6 months of what I consider half-baked performance, the Intel Sandy Bridge came out and I moved to it. With all due respect to AMD / Intel fans alike, my findings were were exactly what Kyle and company discovered. AMD 1090 / 1100 and Bulldozer just do not compete with Intel. I saw 40% performance gains mentioned. One story I will share is about World of Warcraft. When I went from the 1090T at 3.9 / 4.0Ghz to Intel SB, I saw a performance gain for nearly 100% in frame rates. It was just an earth-shattering night and day difference. Thanks for the review. I appreciate it. I will tell people this. Buy what you can afford or what you want. Impress no one but yourself. Don't worry about others. If you do not care about gaming and low performance is ok with you, then BD will be perfectly fine for you. Otherwise, like the review points out, Intel 2500k is the way to go.
 
Michaelius said:
It would be interesting to see results on CF too - Nvidia SLI tends to require more CPU power in games.
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I don't think it matters. The test here quite clearly shows the large gap between the two chips and how quickly the bulldozer is CPU limited. Swapping an x-fire setup instead of the SLI wouldn't change those results.

I'd be willing to bet that at stock speeds the bulldozer would probably reach it's CPU limitation ceiling before, say, a Phenom II 980. That's the truly sad part.

It really is a trainwreck. It's looking worse and worse for AMD here and us AMD fans aren't happy. At all. Why in the world would you market this thing for gamers as a gaming chip? If we look at the piss-poor increase in scaling when increasing cor...err, modules, in games, then the increased core count factor is, too, thrown out the window. And there's like 2 games that utilize more than 4? There's no point.

Let's hope they reconsider and toss out the bulldozer architecture in favor of something new or resembling a phenom II // Thuban shrink. Shorter pipelines, please :)
 
I didn't expect anything to change regarding how well Bulldozer would do regardless of how many video cards were used. But two requests to perhaps give BD a slightly better outcome..

1 - Test using Windows 8 - I doubt a big difference but perhaps the improved thread scheduler in Win 8 might even things out a bit.

2 - use Radeon cards - all the sites that actually recommended Bulldozer (Overclockers Club; Neoseeker; Legit Reviews; Benchmark Reviews; Hi Tech Legion.. to name a few) ALL used Radeons. I believe I only found one review that recommended BD that tested with an nVidia card. I know it is a sad state of affairs when a CPU can't do well regardless of the manufacturer of the video card but apparently AMD's Scorpius platform works better with it's own brand of cards. I assume AMD feels if someone buys their CPU, they are also going to use their video cards.
 
So basically you have to use a OC'd BD FX-8xxx series chips to have a hope at reasonable sli/xfire performance at higher resolutions. I thought that BD might excel in this area or at least not suck as much....how sad.
 
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Well, there you have it. People always say, benchmarking at low "unrealistic" resolutions gives stupid results. They fail to understand that these results can translate very quickly into reality when you increase GPU power. Not every reviewer has 2 GTX580, let alone 3.

This is a massacer for the FX, nothing pretty here.
 
Dan_D said:
This is just speculation but if anything I think we'd see Bulldozer do a little better with Crossfire and CrossfireX than it does with SLI, but this certainly represents a case for the most demanding setup. In which case you need to look toward Intel if you need the performance. I don't think adding Crossfire / CrossfireX into the mix would change the outcome of the evaluation.
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I'm not disputing verdict just saying that with the difference of CPU overhead beetween SLI and CF the triple card scenarios would probably look slightly better for AMD (by which i mean losing slightly less).

Still I'd make even more decisive conclusion (almost Rage! like :D )
 
AMD so far for eh last few years: Amazing graphics Cards!!! You guys rule the roost with your graphics card division.

AMD Fails with the new so-called "Bulldozer" platform. I was not expecting "Athlon Like" performance. However, I was expecting to be able to at least keep up with the Core i5/7 series...
 
Michaelius said:
I'm not disputing verdict just saying that with the difference of CPU overhead beetween SLI and CF the triple card scenarios would probably look slightly better for AMD (by which i mean losing slightly less).

Still I'd make even more decisive conclusion (almost Rage! like :D )
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I don't think making Bulldozer look slightly less bad on purpose will help anyone. The only value I see in that (just my opinion) is letting Crossfire / CrossfireX users know what they are in for if they "upgrade" to Bulldozer / Zambezi. But, most of you have no idea how long that would take. I'd wager that article took well more than 30 hours to complete with all that testing. And I'm being generous with that estimate. The real-world testing method is slow to say the least.
 
Waiting for the classic "But I can reuse my motherboard which I had to upgrade to use bulldozer from my old AM3 system, but I mean I can upgrade the CPU in the future unlike intel rabble rabble rabble."

I don't see anyone ever buying these unless they're being horribly mis-lead by people 'helping them', or they're really dead set on using anything Intel. There is no budgetary win, no performance win, nothing but a higher price tag and power bill.
 
What a colossal failure. I can't imagine that some of these results weren't seen a long time ago; no wonder they let the CEO go, the plug should have been pulled on this architecture years ago.
 
The only bright side I can come up with is maybe this will embarrass AMD enough that they'll really get down to the grind stone and come out with something worth having.
 
Dan_D said:
That would have been wishful thinking at best. We've seen nothing to indicate Bulldozer would be especially good at anything compared to Sandy Bridge, Sandy Bridge-E or Ivy Bridge. Well perhaps encoding, but that's about it. It may be compelling for owners of AM3 / AM3+ motherboards since that's the only upgrade path they have after Phenom II. I'm sure those stuck in that upgrade path (without spending the cash on an Intel chipset based board) wish it was better, but wishing for a thing does not make it so.
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Exactly! On my Asus Sabertooth using the 0705 bios I get similar results as you'll get. But the system is so unstable that it's not worthwhile to use that bios. If I use the 0810 bios I can't get Dirt 3, Total War Shogun 2, Dawn of War 2 Retribution, Portal 2, F.E.A.R3, Deus Ex, Saint's Row The Third, etc to get to the loading screen.

But the system is stable playing anything else but SteamWorks games. For example in Battlefield 3 I'm at 25 hours played with 0 glitches on the 0810 bios. I can encode video, play other games, without a hitch. As long as I don't touch those SteamWorks games.


AMD has the buggiest crap available today. Complete waste of my time and money!
 
I can't put much faith in the Civ V numbers because of how much Intel helped the guys out with optimizing the game and the entire engine behind it.

And I still think it's a bad idea to invest in AM3+ when 2012 brings.. whatever the replacement socket was? Not FM1.
 
Facts are facts and no one will dispute the winner/loser here.

The only question I have is given the erratic graphs of the AMD chip in the early tests, I wonder if AMD can discern what going on there?

Why is it behaving like this? The peak of each erratic spike is fairly close to the Intel chip.

Again, no doubt AMD got their butt kicked but these charts seem to point to something not working right with Bulldozer.
 
I think we can finally say shut up to those idiots that think CPU doesn't matter when it comes to games (I'm looking at people with C2D/C2Q systems with anything over 460 GTX SLI).
 
Lord_Exodia said:
Bulldozer architecture = Train wreck


AMD's stock may have gone up recently because of their above expectations quarterly earnings and demand for their APU's

SELL SELL SELL!!!
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not at all. these are going to be huge at worst buy. (LOOK FOLKS! TWICE THE CORES!!)
 
The Gonz said:
Facts are facts and no one will dispute the winner/loser here.

The only question I have is given the erratic graphs of the AMD chip in the early tests, I wonder if AMD can discern what going on there?

Why is it behaving like this? The peak of each erratic spike is fairly close to the Intel chip.

Again, no doubt AMD got their butt kicked but these charts seem to point to something not working right with Bulldozer.
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Read the section entitled, " The Software Factor"
 
man bulldozer really gets spanked by the cheaper 2500k. You would really expect 8 cores to beat 4, but it's really not even close. And the framerates on most games is so up and down, something is seriously wrong with bulldozer.
 
Nookie420 said:
man bulldozer really gets spanked by the cheaper 2500k. You would really expect 8 cores to beat 4, but it's really not even close. And the framerates on most games is so up and down, something is seriously wrong with bulldozer.
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And if you look at the software where Bulldozer needs DX11 + multithreaded code and a new compiled binary for it to function(well) it wouldn't matter if Bulldozer had 25 cores.
 
Awesome review, as usual. Thanks for taking on the task for all the tests, even if just about all of us could have predicted the results ahead of time.

I'm still staying far away from Bullsnoozer for my upgrade in a few months.
 
I would still be interested in seeing some dual and triple crossfire setup testing. Just because of some of the anomalies seen with triple SLI not scaling at all on the AMD setup. Makes me wonder if there is some sort of issue where the AMD platform itself (more-so that just the CPU) may be causing some problems with SLI.
 
Dear Mr. Bulldozer,

We found your ass........
you seem to have lost it.:eek:

yours sincerely,

Intel Sandy Bridge.
 
Something about those average and min frames on the amd fx ... guess we ll have to wait for another stepping or new amd architecture....
 
this question might sound out of place.

however.

what is Intel doing so good, and AMD doing so bad?
 
I'm interesting in seeing:

1) BD + xfire
1) BD tuned to 1 core/module to see if it shows a difference.
 
vict0r said:
what is Intel doing so good, and AMD doing so bad?
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AMD's showing is a result of the company being less than a tenth the size of Intel and simply not having enough money to develop a CPU that's competitive with Intel.

During the Athlon, K7, K8 days they had their chance. Intel royally screwed up with the Pentium 4, which allowed AMD to catch up (and actually beat them for a little while)

They were - however - never able to take advantage of this performance advantage that fell into their laps as much as they should have, because Intel made secretive illegal deals with the major OEM's to keep AMD chips out of their machines.

As a result of this AMD made less revenue off of those generations of chips than they should have.

Intel eventually settled with AMD out of court for about $1 billion. AMD only accepted this because they were desperate for cash. A real court settlement would likely have been closer to $10 billion.

Anyway, long story not, fair or not, AMD simply did not have the cash to develop a good competitor to current Intel chips.

This was exacerbated by the acquisition of ATI, which took even more cash and attention away from CPU development.

AMD's CPU's were always inferior to Intel's up until '99 when the Athlon was released. it was a solid design, able to keep up with Pentium III clock for clock (and even beat it) but it was nothing earth shattering. Then Intel screwed the pooch with Pentium 4 and allowed AMD to overtake them in the performance race.

AMD could have taken advantage of this to become a real competitor to intel by making huge revenues off of their performance advantage and reinvesting them in the business, but because they were cheated to be kept out of the OEMs, the cash simply was not there to keep up and do a repeat performance, which led to the disappointing K10 Phenom and Phenom II's and now Bulldozer.

Unless Intel screws up again as badly as they did with Pentium 4, I don't see AMD ever being able to catch back up, and I think they realize this, which is why they are trying to branch out with integrated graphics instead...
 
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Ouch man... well..... AMD is not going to get alot of gamers promoting bulldozer that way. Good thing they have the GPU market that they are still doing well at.

This is a pure beatdown delivered by intel CPU's.
 
Now that is the way that I wish more sites would do a gaming oriented cpu comparison. Great job guys. :D
 
LOL everyone on this forums is into BF3.

Looking for BF3 BD SLI/Tri-SLI benchmarks...oh none, hey nice review.
 
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