What will AVX do for consumers?

Kaldskryke

[H]ard|Gawd
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So Sandy Bridge will support Intel's new instruction set, Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). Even AMD's Bulldozer will be able to support AVX. Maybe I just don't know enough about instructions and how they are used to increase performance, but I'm having a hard time seeing how these will be used in the consumer space, specifically gaming. Will AVX be able to accelerate the kind of vector math used in game engines (the physics parts, at least)? Will AVX make a big enough difference to cause gamers to upgrade from a ~4GHz quad-core Nehalem?

TIA. I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I used search but didn't find anything useful. I haven't gotten much from Google either.
 
From what I understand, AVX also has some new algorithms that make it more efficient at multi-threaded tasks. Thats what I interpreted the stuff I read as saying anyways, it looked like pretty technical stuff. I know Intel said that AVX will be good for multimedia type stuff as well.
 
The thing about new instruction sets is that the software has to be specifically written to take advantage of it.

And software developers don't usually jump on brand new stuff when there isn't a whole lot of machines out there that would be able to take advantage of it. (knock on wood)
 
AVX will increase SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) vector registers from 128-bit XMM registers to 256-bit registers. I've read quite a lot of articles, considering Sandy Bridge architecture: some are claiming, that SB processors will be just a slightly tuned Nehalems (slightly faster clock for clock, lower TDP...), meanwhile others are shouting, that AVX is no less revolutionary than SSE2 was over SSE. If that turns out to be true, then SBs will be much faster than Nehalems in AVX optimized applications. I had also found an article, claiming that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was going to allow the OS to take advantage of AVX, too. What is more, AVX should speed up the performance of current instruction sets like SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2... a bit. It's just too early to draw the final conclusion. :)
 
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sorry to bump an old thread but I was wondering how much of a difference AVX makes in terms of gaming performance...I'm a huge gamer and I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and currently have a 6 core i7 980X (2010) which is still going strong but lacks some of the fancy instruction sets of recent CPU's...is my 980X still going to be fine for the foreseeable future or do these newer features make a big difference?...and will my 980X be a bottleneck of some sort with my GTX 970? (1920 x 1200)
 
sorry to bump an old thread but I was wondering how much of a difference AVX makes in terms of gaming performance...I'm a huge gamer and I recently upgraded to a GTX 970 and currently have a 6 core i7 980X (2010) which is still going strong but lacks some of the fancy instruction sets of recent CPU's...is my 980X still going to be fine for the foreseeable future or do these newer features make a big difference?...and will my 980X be a bottleneck of some sort with my GTX 970? (1920 x 1200)

Don't worry, your CPU is more than capable of running all the latest games and it will not bottleneck a GTX970. As far as AVX is concerned, it does not make any difference in gaming simply because games are not optimized/compiled to take advantage of it. To make matters worse, just a very few scientific applications do take advantage of it despite the fact that AVX has been around for almost 4 years now. And even if apps were optimized for AVX, I doubt the real-life difference would be that big. I'm running a very similar CPU to yours and I suggest you overclock it to at least 4GHz or more for some extra performance if you haven't already.

By the way, I can see I posted in this thread 4 years ago claiming AVX would the the second SSE2 (which doubled the amount of XMM registers from 8 to 16 for better floating point performance and yielded huge benefits), but apparently things are not going this way.
 
Don't worry, your CPU is more than capable of running all the latest games and it will not bottleneck a GTX970. As far as AVX is concerned, it does not make any difference in gaming simply because games are not optimized/compiled to take advantage of it. To make matters worse, just a very few scientific applications do take advantage of it despite the fact that AVX has been around for almost 4 years now. And even if apps were optimized for AVX, I doubt the real-life difference would be that big. I'm running a very similar CPU to yours and I suggest you overclock it to at least 4GHz or more for some extra performance if you haven't already.

By the way, I can see I posted in this thread 4 years ago claiming AVX would the the second SSE2 (which doubled the amount of XMM registers from 8 to 16 for better floating point performance and yielded huge benefits), but apparently things are not going this way.

I thought the whole point of these new instruction sets were so that developers would use them in games...I thought I read that GRID 2 specifically used AVX...so most developers are not using them at all and are still using SSE2/SSE3?
 
You're right, GRID2 uses AVX for the DirectX extension as long as you run the game on an integrated GPU. I think Crysis3 supports AVX as well, however, the difference between the first and second generation Core i CPUs is very insignificant.
 
You can make the technology available, but you cannot make people take advantage of it. I am constantly reminded of this at work.
 
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