A serious note on AMD and games

[Hicksimus]

I see so many odd comments on these forums about AMD and gaming(mostly in other sections) that I figured I'd toss this out there. The TL: DR is that AMD processors have added cores to achieve good cumulative performance while Intel has gone with more powerful cores. The end result is more uniform and generally better performance from Intel in gaming, sometimes AMD is close and sometimes AMD is on a much lower level. The rest of this thread is based on two sets of GPU-z and CPU core usage screenshots.

My system:
1045T @ 3.7Ghz
7850 2Gb @ 1081MHz core, 1375MHz memory
8Gb of RAM

The focus here is on the red bars(the GPU Load one especially), the CPU usage is included to show what works well on our processors and what doesn't.

A couple of well-made games that work great on AMD and Intel

Spoiler

Lots of cores being used fairly effectively results in great performance. Especially considering that the Phenom II line doesn't do as great as Bulldozer/Piledriver in Far Cry 3....and mine is only running at 3.7Ghz.

5 Poorly made games that only run great on Intel, while being mediocre to poor on AMD(Warning: long image)

Spoiler

There are many games available that look like these. AMD processors have been focusing on an increased number of cores to achieve cumulative power while Intel processors have been developing stronger cores. So lazy game developers cram a lot in to games that only use a few cores and while Intel is ahead by a small margin in well-made games they are now on a whole other level of performance.

When I play the bad games noted here on a stock 3570 or an OCd 3770 they run anywhere from quite smooth to perfectly, but they obviously aren't that way if you don't have excellent performance per core and no AMD processor offers that.

So if somebody says "I have an FX-6300 and a 7950, sometimes I get low FPS, should I get another 7950" and somebody just blurts out "yes, I play 2 games and they run great on my 6300" tell them they need to know a lot more before they go telling somebody to attach $500 in GPU to a stock clock $130 CPU. Sometimes the right upgrade for gaming is to buy Intel, it all depends on what you play.

Edit: You can overclock the latest AMD 6/8 core processors to 5Ghz and easily outperform my 1045T in the bad games but even if you achieve 50% more CPU performance(which I doubt) they'll still be behind a stock 3570k (about 60-70% better per core than my [email protected]) in the poorly made games and some of them will still not run smoothly.

Double Edit: I will be trying to get ahold of the 3570 machine to toss my 7850 in for comparison, but I may end up just buying one soon anyway.

 

[caddi daddi]

hicksimus, you are so correct, it is also a cost benefit thing it looks like.
going amd just seems to cost less, of course with big ghz comes big cooling and bigger bucks.

 

[Dlaw]

going amd just seems to cost less, of course with big ghz comes big cooling and bigger bucks.

True, but the same applies on the Intel side as well.

I went AMD because a decent quad core processor was ~$130 (maybe less for the 960T when I bought it, I don't remember). A decent quad from Intel at the time would have been considerably more expensive, maybe double. For an $800 machine, I think this performs pretty well, I dare say better than a build on the Intel side for the same price. Certainly not top tier, though.

 

[RGone]

I can hear the common sense and I can hear the dollars and sense. What is so crazy as has been mentiioned already is trying to get by with a $200.00 AMD mobo and processor but willing to spend better than $300.00 for a video card. That does not compute and then being told they have to overclock that AMD processor to get some more video performance and they have that $200.00 worth of mobo and cpu. That is just off. RGone...

 

[Dlaw]

Yep, if your going to spend that kind of money on a video card, you should spend the dough to put it on a platform that compliments it, not hinders it.

 

[Mpegger]

Not everyone runs with a CPU that has more then 2 cores for gaming, and the majority still uses Intel, so it makes sense that game programmers would optimize their code for such platforms.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

 

[Hicksimus]

Not everyone runs with a CPU that has more then 2 cores for gaming

That's like saying not everybody owns a car best suited to driving on pavement so we've turned all of the roads into trails right? Or did I miss the point?

 

[Mpegger]

Very poor analogy (doesn't even make sense to me), and yes, you missed the point.

If (going by Steam's hardware survey which should be a good measurement of current PC gamer hardware) almost 75% of PC gamer systems are Intel, and almost 50% are still on a dual core cpu, why would the programmer/company waste time (ie, $$$) on programming a game for anything more then 2 threads, and optimized for a AMD cpu? Programming and optimizing something to take advantage of multiple threads/AMD hardware isn't as simple as just telling the compiler to "make it so", so calling them (the programmer) lazy is far from the truth (though in some cases could very well be it). Programming has evolved over the years to take advantage of emerging hardware, and even though multi-core processors have been around for quite some time and are the "norm" now, its still a safer bet to keep the thread count low to ensure performance across all hardware. Not only that, but programming for multiple threads requires knowledge and experience in doing so effectively. The current crop of programmers are probably all used to single threaded programs, so it'll be more years before programmers get "up to date" or a newer thread aware generation of programmers take thier place.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a game that would make full use of all available cycles on all 6 cores on my cpu, but why would a programmer/company spend the time ($$$) and effort to do so for such a miniscule of a niche market? Other then bragging rights which could backfire (Crytek engine) it doesn't make financial sense, which is what drives the companies to make the games in the first place.

 

[Hicksimus]

I take partial blame for this thread coming to this point because I should have tossed in some 4 core performance images for the good games(which still run well at 4 cores).

To avoid going on a long post here I'll break it down to this.

All I'm saying is that if any of those games I labeled as poorly made were to properly utilize anybody's quad core made in the last 3-4 years (41% of your steam example) that things would work properly for everybody with a passable CPU(instead of just for people with 2 or 3 very powerful cores). BUT, the whole big point of this thread is still the same....I've seen people recommending $500 and $600 GPU setups to people who "play games" on AMD processors(not knowing which games). There are games that barely run passably on Intel's recent offerings, and the reason for this is almost always because they are running very demanding loads on a low number of cores(sometimes even too low a number of cores for Sandy/Ivy users). Those games that barely run well, or even run passably on recent Intel processors because of their powerful cores will not run properly on AMD or pre-gulftown Intel and slapping $500+ worth of graphics card(s) onto really any AMD or pre-Gulftown processor can result in huge disappointment if people aren't careful to ask exactly which games are being played and which games may be played in the future.

I stand by my poorly made statement though. Those games I labeled as poorly made really are(the reason doesn't matter, I'm not suggesting anything more than exactly what I said). If it's barely running properly on Gulftown(OC'd)/Sandy/Ivy because it's too lightly threaded then it's going to run really poorly for probably any AMD user and likely a large number of Intel users(they clearly have the tools to do better, and they choose not to use them). I have no idea how much of the Intel share is pre-2010 on steam, but none of them are experiencing great performance in the games I labeled as poorly made.