DuronBurgerMan
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Mar 13, 2017
- Messages
- 1,340
Intel is 7--12% ahead depending what model is compared.
Depends on where you're getting your averages. I've seen averages across reputable reviewers and a collection of many games ranging from 3% to 12%, in either 720p or 1080p. 5% was the value I predicted, and the most comprehensive 1080p average I've seen so far suggested 4.97% as the average gap. I accept this value for 1080p. I have not yet done enough digging on the 720p results to either agree or disagree with any specific value there yet.
"Tomorrow" can mean the next year or the one after. And the best current CPUs will continue being relevant for gaming. If you play to games at 4K and you don't plan to update your GPU, then you don't need the best gaming GPU, you don't need a $400 Zen2 CPU either, an older $100 i3 is enough.
Of course it is. Sandy Bridge (and maybe even Nehalem) are still fine. Really, anybody with SB or higher doesn't need to upgrade their CPU. Not for gaming, anyway.
"Tomorrow" doesn't mean a decade away. Much faster GPUs will be available in one or two years, but the number of cores/threads used by game engines will not increase in the same proportion in the same time period, not even close. Reviewers know this and that is why they perform "CPU tests" of gaming.
For a time. As we approach silicon limits, I imagine GPUs may reach a similar wall as CPUs are approaching.
have been hearing the myth of parallelism on games since Bulldozer ("soon eight cores will be the minimum required for games!"), and I did hear it again with Piledriver, with PS4 and Xbox, with Mantle, with DX12, with Vulkan... Reality is that ancient four-core i7 continues being valid for a gaming build today
It's not a myth. Parallelism in games has increased. There was a time when single core CPUs were sufficient. When dual cores first game out, it took a while for devs to use those resources more directly (though dual core was always better if you were multitasking). It was the same for when quads came out, then quads with HT. Today, near-max performance is attainable with either 4c/8t CPUs or 6c/6t CPUs. Though Gamers Nexus noted that the Ryzen 3600 was a better buy than the 9600k, even though the 9600k had a higher average frame rate - because the 9600k was subject to frame time spikes and stuttering that the 6c/12t Ryzen part wasn't subject to (though it wasn't that the 9600k was bad). So it may be that 6c/12t or 8c/8t will soon become the default minimum for high end gaming performance.
Point is, parallelism has increased over the years. It's not a myth. The myth was that it would increase overnight, or that an abysmally bad uarch like Bulldozer would ever see enough of a gain to be even remotely competitive with Intel on anything except price.
This is the master thread, everything else (rendering, AI, sound processing,...) can be moved to slave threads executed in additional cores, but those slaves threads are launched, controlled, synchronized, and ended by the master thread.
So the performance of the game will continue being given by the master thread. If the core running the master thread bottlenecks then it doesn't matter if you have eight cores or a hundred cores executing slave threads, the game will run exactly the same because the extra cores will be awaiting to the core executing the master thread.
True to a point. Games will likely always have one thread that is more critical than the others for this reason. However, necessity is the mother of invention here. The tough part of our current circumstances is that increasing core/thread count is becoming easier than increasing single-thread speed. New nodes are becoming very difficult and expensive. The silicon wall approaches, my friend. We both know this. Hell, we may witness the death of x86 altogether at some point, because ARM is becoming quite impressive. Hard to say where things are going to go. But if I were a game developer, I'd see the writing on the wall for raw single-threaded performance, and be looking for ways to better utilize parallelism.