Also the game is more than playable on my old Phenom 955 at 3.6 based rig, I tested a few days ago out of curiosity. The only place you really suffer somewhat is in towns due to the shadows.
Everytime I get involved in one of these "bottleneck" related threads, I end up wanting to throw my monitor out the window and start screaming....
I couldn't agree more, that's why one should always try to get the best for their money, performance wise, but not disregard that all components in the pcv should be balanced in performance so theres no loss.... for eg.. an athlon II x2 with a 6950.... that would be a waste of VGA power
Strange you should say that. I was running an Athlon II with my 6950 before I got my X4. In fact I only bought this 955 a week ago...
Like 10-15 fps increase in newer games that don't have so much CPU needs... BF3 for eg. but Skyrim is another story. Of course, there SHOULD be a slight improvement though. I would have waited and get an i5 or even ivy bridge + a 7000 series card (when they are released)
Why is it strange? Did you do it because you felt the athlon was bottlenecking or just for the sake of upgrading? just curious I just upgraded from an Athlon II x4 640 3,0Ghz @ 3.45Ghz to an i5 2500K and as I had almost no time because of work I only got to install all hardware + all software and windows updates but couldn't test real game performance yet... i played a bit with the OC too got 4.3Ghz with auto level up but i feel temps are a tad high... so i'll be checking the Vcore setting when i have a moment... and also its cuz probably the arctic silver ceramique 2 is just starting to settle on my V8 cooler.... I belive that a phenom x4 is a great performer for its price, but as maaaany threads treated the subjet, in games where there is 1 or 2 thread, and even in games that use 4 there's a real advantage on intel as their raw core performance is higher
^ I mean coincidence not strange, that u described my last setup exactly... or did you already know I had an Athlon II The reason I got the X4 was to run BF3 smoothly, up till then I could run any game except Crysis2 at reasonable fps using just 2 cores. BF3 however is multithreaded really well so it maxed out both cores on my X2, this caused occasional fps drop and stuttering at 100% load... On top of this Athlon II's don't have any L3 cache which helps. Anyway it was the 100% load that was the biggest problem. BF3 cpu scaling results showed more cores had less load, so overclocking further wasn't going to help, I had to get multicore. I got the X4 and my core load dropped to about 65%, and stuttering completely disappeared as well as fps dips. My max fps did not improve though which I think indicates clock speed isn't very important. At both 4.1 & 3.0ghz my fps were the same. Number of threads/cores plays a big part in performance. Not sure how to define that... thread bound?? It's def not CPU bound unless there aren't enough cores... As long as it doesn't hit 100% load then the CPU isn't a big factor... So yeah that's why I got the X4, otherwise I'd still be happy with the humble Athlon...
I agree with you that Athlon II's are amazing little budget processors as I had myself 2 of those, a x3 and a x4... both run in-windows at the same speed, very responsive, snappy and never felt slow at all except while decompressing files like 4+GB images or smthing on rar or zip or 7z. On the other hand I don't know which environment you are talking about on BF3 as I with the athlon x4 @3.45 + 6850 got 40 to 70fps on single player on ultra -AA -Motion blur but in multiplayer with the same config it became unplayable. 12 to 30 fps. the cpu becomes important when besides graphics, there are many objects and phisics and calculations that need to be done at the same time, like in multiplayer, were there are 32+ players in the same server and there's just too much information to be rendered... there's when the CPU kicks in hard, and there's where athlons just can't cope... well, and of course the VGA is also running out of Vram too... Reaching 100% usage on the VGA and the CPU isn't good at all, it means you are maxing out their capabilities and reached its limits....
^Oh yeah MP and SP are worlds apart... SP uses about 700mb, MP uses around 1.4BG vram at Ultra settings. I got about the same fps as you in SP, but in MP I could run it OK..not great but OK. This prob means you ran outta vram....happens to a lot of people if the BF3 thread is any indication... MSAA uses a lot of vram so reducing it to 2x may help your performance...
I noticed in this thread that the actual users like myself and several others who upgraded from sk 775 quads and others with P2 all got major fps improvements with cpu limited games and very healthy increases in all other games. A P2 at 4ghz will hold back the performance of a high end card. Seen it with 480, 580, 295. you have to remember a P2 is socket 775 performance. and there are no less than 4 sockets released by intel better than socket 775. will the card run ok with OP cpu? yes it will but performance will be held back by the power of the cpu
Qft, i went from a 1055T at 3.5GHz to this 2500k and it is an amazing difference. The 1055T had possibly worse 2 thread performance then my older E8400 at 3.6GHz.
I had a random thought...say you had a 580 and upgraded the CPU from an i5 to an i7..an got FPS increase in games. You (or I) would declare that by upgrading to an i7 you had effectively removed the CPU bottleneck right? But what if then another CPU was released that was faster than an i7 and you installed it and got another increase in fps... This would of course mean that the i7 actually was bottlenecking your 580, only you had no way to prove it wasn't because you didn't have a faster cpu to compare.. What I'm saying is in theory it's possible that a 580 is permanently bottlenecked by the CPU, just more or less depending on the CPU installed.... LOL does that make sense....it was a mind fuk for me in some ways lol.. Just some random Friday afternoon thoughts..
i used to have a E8500 3.6ghz on this 5870 and my i5 2500k has nearly doubled the performance on everything. BF3 uses <60% cpu usage at 4.4ghz and gpu is 100% all the time. In BFBC2 my e8500 was at 100% usage and it suttered :/ bottlenecks are real accept it.
OK but answer me this.. how is it possible that the CPU is holding back the card when the GPU is running at 100%? It simply cannot work any faster..so in this case the bottleneck is removed....right? Relates to my earlier comment about bottlenecks depending on the application. This would apply to both cpu and gpu...
You are comparing 2 different game engines. Sorry but your logic is flawed. Besides nobody said bottlenecks don't exist.. Take chill pill, we are here trying to have a civilized discussion, if that doesn't suit you, then exit stage right ---------------------------->
Doesn't always work like that though, I think it depends on the game really, since I upgraded from the Pentium E6300 I noticed that some games no longer have constant 100% gpu usage but around 70-98%, which says to me that there is a GPU bottleneck now.
Im comparing two engines coz i got rid of the E8500 6 months ago and i gained 40 fps with bad company with the same gpu, i guess ignorance and generic benchmarks is bliss, im on a low income while im training and still saved and got a new processor, i bet if you had a i5 2500k you would say the same, people are so jealous and narrow minded its unreal lmao (and yes i work in IT) uke2:
According to this benchmark, a phenom II X4 does not "bottleneck" a gtx 580. http://www.techspot.com/review/458-battlefield-3-performance/page7.html In cpu heavy and games that use 2 cores or less, sandybridge will give better performance, but that does not mean the cpu is "bottlenecking" the gpu.
