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HD 5870 and Your CPU

B

Blacklash

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 16, 2004
Messages
1,893
I've been seeing a lot of folks asking around on various forums about if their CPU is good enough for a 5870. Below is an old article that shows a GTX 295 on a variety of CPUs at various speeds and on monitors @ 1680x, 1920x and 2560x.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=807&p=5

Why link it? The 5870 and 295 are in the same power ball park. It may help some people decide if they wish to upgrade their platform/CPU. Personally, I wouldn't sweat getting something like 118FPS instead of 125. I would be concerned if my CPU was holding me down to 25FPS when I could be doing 40.
 
Blacklash said:
I've been seeing a lot of folks asking around on various forums about if their CPU is good enough for a 5870. Below is an old article that shows a GTX 295 on a variety of CPUs at various speeds and on monitors @ 1680x, 1920x and 2560x.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=807&p=5

Why link it? The 5870 and 295 are in the same power ball park. It may help some people decide if they wish to upgrade their platform/CPU. Personally, I wouldn't sweat getting something like 118FPS instead of 125. I would be concerned if my CPU was holding me down to 25FPS when I could be doing 40.
Click to expand...

That link makes me want a 5870 even more than I already do.... thanks a lot :D
 
the problem with the legion hardware article is that their numbers are all averages. a good average is not indicative of friendly minimums.
 
The big difference between the 5870 and GTX295 is one is a single GPU and another is dual GPU.

I can't remember where I read it, but some article showed that Dual GPUs(both NV and ATI) get significant gains with an i7 compared to a C2D/Q. Highend SIngle GPU cars didnt have a big difference between an i7 and decent clocked C2D/Q.

I'm hoping a C2D is still good enough to drive a 5800 card.
 
Solid mins FPS @ 1920x1200 with filtering is one of the reasons I grabbed the 5870. Another is smoother FPS with less hitching vs multi-GPU.
 
Seeing in a Guru3D review of the 5870 and 5850, and another website, that a Core i7 965 overclocked even bottlenecks on two games makes me wonder if there is a CPU fast enough to feed it enough data.

Could the short term solution be a dual CPU board with two Xeons or two Opeterons, or go for broke at the extreme end with a 6-core Xeon (12 threads)?

And, the long term solution is to wait for the 6-core Gulftown from Intel or 6-core Thubian from AMD?

I bet we'll hit the same issue with the GT300 from Nvidia when it's released-- GPU too fast for the CPU?

Larabee (if it ever is released) perhaps, same issue?
 
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I'd look at Crossfire scaling on a stock 3.2GHz i7-

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17652/3

I don't see much of a limitation there. Also you can see solid differences between the 4890 and 5870. When your FPS rises from 66 to 120 your CPU is not holding you back.
 
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Could the short term solution be a dual CPU board with two Xeons or two Opeterons, or go for broke at the extreme end with a 6-core Xeon (12 threads)?

And, the long term solution is to wait for the 6-core Gulftown from Intel or 6-core Thubian from AMD?
Click to expand...

It depends if they have more cache then that is another deciding factor. But in general the percentage of games that make good use of more then 2 cpu's is small.

Im going to go out on a limb now and say that Windows 7 might have a good impact on the gaming industry but rest asured it is prolly nowhere near as efficient as say BeOS in software that is multithreaded.

I would have hoped that this angle of gaming would be "fixed" but being stuck in same old same old coding people never were forced to work like this due to the performance gains in keeping it all in a single thread.


Btw backlash to many people been scared of buying a 5870 due to their cpu.
Maybe that is something for the [H] crew , find the cpu that absolutly performs the worst on the 5870 ;) .
 
Yeah, Pieter, looking at the various 5870 reviews makes me wonder if my AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ BE would even suffice now. XD

I've had that CPU for two years already, and in two years, CPU performance as usual has jumped up exponentially.

I wonder: If programmers started considering coding with multiple-threads/multiple cores in mind maybe 5, 10 or 15 years ago, would we have better programs and better games now that are more efficient and more adaptable to the sheer speed at how fast technology advances?

I remember reading an old article in one of the PC magazines a long time ago regarding symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) and parallel processing. They interviewed several programmers, and the general attitude they had about SMP is that there wasn't an immediate need to program for multiple CPUs unless you were coding for a server or a supercomputer or needed that kind of program to take advantage of those many CPUs that work in parallel. Other reasons were the difficulty and costs inherent in programming for more than one CPU, the same argument heard time and time again since the Sega Saturn up to the PS2 and the PS3 afterwards.

And, here we are now: games and programs just starting to be programmed with multithreading/multiple cores in mind. It's all just playing catch-up now.
 
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