Question about performace

Curious about internal testing results

from Elemental Forums

Thinking about getting started on my new PC build and a couple of things caught my eye while poking around at Newegg. I saw a few 2gig video cards that are not dual GPU, so that's a considerable amount of video memory available. I remember stepping up to 512 on Civ4 helped a little when looking around the map. When it comes to CPUs I'm torn between a 6 core AMD chip, or a 4 core Intel chip with HT.

Now when the 64bit edition is released, if I go AMD I'll be using 4Gigs of system memory to start with, and upgrade to 8 later on. Now, the videocard question is a 1gig versus 2gig version, and how much will Elemental make use of that extra chunk?

2nd question is the AMD 6 cores/6 full threads or the Intel 4 cores and 8 threads. Has any internal testing been done to see who wins out in that scenario?

elemental
6,389 views 8 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Having more video memory allows you to play at higher resolutions. If you play at 1680x1050 or 1920x1080 you can get away with 1 GB of video memory - having 2 GB will do nothing for you in this case. However, anything higher than 1920x1080 will require 2 GB of video memory to play properly.

Your second question is specific to Elemental and will depend on whether it was coded for multiple cores/threads.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

To be honest, I don't even look at video cards much anymore.  64-bit is the way to go on the OS and an SSD. :)

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top




2nd question is the AMD 6 cores/6 full threads or the Intel 4 cores and 8 threads. Has any internal testing been done to see who wins out in that scenario?

End of quote

 

It's not all about cores and threads (just like it's not about bits), especially with games. I'm not sure if Elemental is multi-threaded or not, but just to show you an example here are L4D2 benchmarks ran using the 6 core Phenom vs similar Intel chips including the one you were probably asking about:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-9.html

Notice that even the older 4 core phenom beats the new 6 core. I don't know exactly why but Tomshardware is usually decent about their benchmarks being accurate.

 

Here's what Tom's hardware recommends as the best gaming CPU's for the money as of this month:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i5-athlon-ii,2675.html

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting SpaghettiMon, reply 3


It's not all about cores and threads (just like it's not about bits), especially with games. I'm not sure if Elemental is multi-threaded or not, but just to show you an example here are L4D2 benchmarks ran using the 6 core Phenom vs similar Intel chips including the one you were probably asking about:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-9.html



Notice that even the older 4 core phenom beats the new 6 core. I don't know exactly why but Tomshardware is usually decent about their benchmarks being accurate.

 

Here's what Tom's hardware recommends as the best gaming CPU's for the money as of this month:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i5-athlon-ii,2675.html

End of SpaghettiMon's quote

For a given CPU surface area, there's a certain amount of heat that can be generated safely. When you go from 4 cores to 6 (or 2 to 4, or 1 to 2), you have more cores but the same total heat to work with. That tends to mean each individual core is slower. That's the issue with 4 cores to 6. (Early on with dual cores, for most games a single core was actually faster.)

The Intel CPUs are very good at seeing when cores are idle and shutting them off, then overclocking the active cores. For any load where you don't actually have six active threads, Intel CPUs tend to do better for that reason. Every game I've ever played generally falls into this category, with 4 active threads or less at once.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

My quad runs the game fine, well except when the AI goes all crazy and does whatever he does to make the game lag like heck, and half the world is his city. whatever hes doing I don't know.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

The beta's are a  debug version that writes out all sort of stuff to the debug.err and generates dump/zip files, these slow things down, that said the game gets pretty sluggish around turn 300 or so.

 

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Good to know. I'm running slowly too, ESPECIALLY LATEGAME. I frequently have to quit and restart the game as that speeds it up. I almost wonder if there is a memory leak somewhere.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Sure *HOPE* the final version runs faster.  Performance after I play a while is flat-up unacceptable on my current rig.   (xp sp3 3gb ram, core-2-duo processor, ati 5670 512mb).

Will probably to buy new sometime in the next six months -- wait to see how the official release runs, then pepper the forums with questions about the relative importance of fast cores, many cores, ram,  graphics options, disc options, etc, etc.