HD 7970: Bulldozer vs. Sandy Bridge vs. Nehalem

[Damn_Smooth]

Of course.... Dual core optimiser was more of a patch that helped 'sync' some programs that had some timing issues when it came to dual core.

A good example of this would be CoD:UO - the first map in the SP stage where your in the forrest. sometimes things wont spawn or scripts that are ment to happen at a certain time dont happen at all.

It didnt really boost performance of Windows per se but when it came to programs that need to bypass Windows API for timing thus fixing some of the problems some games were having.

plus even WITHOUT the dual core optimiser patch installed, it hardly made a difference to benchmarks at all in my experience. you could live without it and never know it existed.

People are looking at this patch from M$ like its some holy grail of patches and its gonna bring balance to the force when its not going to do shit all. If M$ are truely capable of making a CPU shine just by patching it then why the hell would we need such powerful processors??? We could be any cheap ass low-end multicored CPU and just have M$ write a patch that optimises the hell out of it.

With that being said... you could put Michael Schumacher in a banged up Ford Cortina and he will drive like a boss and put on a world class performance, but at the same time. he wont win any races. because a driver is only as good as his car. and the car totally sucks at this juncture of all junctures.

What a nicely written post just to say that BD sucks and it always will suck. I already knew that though.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

the worst thing is im not trying to troll lol

 

[theJesus]

Looking at the Skyrim result (all cpu across all resolution), I do wonder whether this 7970 is too much overkill even for 2500K. At the lowest resolution up until max resolution, there's barely any difference. Is this a sign that this game eats cpu for breakfast?

Skyrim does eat CPU for breakfast.

 

[Damn_Smooth]

the worst thing is im not trying to troll lol

I don't think it is possible to troll when talking about BD anymore. I was one of the biggest AMD fanboys on here until reality kicked me in the ass, and that reality is that BD isn't worth the price of admission for anyone that considers gaming their primary use.

I wasn't trying to be sarcastic in my other post or anything, I did find your post very nicely written.

 

[qubit]

the worst thing is im not trying to troll lol

I know you're not, as well and you gotta love the rhyme in "troll lol".

 

[Mussels]

I know you're not, as well and you gotta love the rhyme in "troll lol".

trollololololol.

 

[qubit]

trollololololol.

Well, what can I say, but 'lol'?

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

the worst thing is im not trying to troll lol

well you and damn smooth are doin a terrible job Not trollin

 

[Mussels]

considering most people are all 'hey, BD isnt as bad as some people claim' and you two are all OMG ITS STILL LAAAAAAME


its kinda funny, actually. sure its not the best bang for your buck, but not every CPU can be? theres always gotta be a winner, and more often than not, its not the most recently launched one.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

and you two are all OMG ITS STILL LAAAAAAME

quite the opposite in fact. I didnt say it was totally lame, at best its a passable attempt by AMD. I know the CPU was primarily designed with servers in mind so they might excel at doing things a server normally would do...

WITH THAT BEING SAID...even Intels Xeon chips for servers are just totally awesome, and it doesnt matter if you use them in a server or a desktop, they will still perform really really well and not require a patch to boost performance.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

that said amd amd amd amd amd haha not intel intel not simple

ps intel intel intel nvidia the end

ford or GM what ya sayin?

 

[Damn_Smooth]

considering most people are all 'hey, BD isnt as bad as some people claim' and you two are all OMG ITS STILL LAAAAAAME


its kinda funny, actually. sure its not the best bang for your buck, but not every CPU can be? theres always gotta be a winner, and more often than not, its not the most recently launched one.

I'm the one saying it's lame, and it is. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, AMD dropped the ball on this for gamers and that's who they marketed it to. I didn't even care about the price performance, I wanted a decent upgrade for the Phenom II X6s and every review of the CPU that is out there shows that it was a sidegrade at best.

As you can see by the board I am presently using, I fell hard for their decent marketing. I take full accountability for that because I know it was my own stupidity, but I am going to call a turd a turd when talking about the CPU.

 

[ensabrenoir]

I'm the one saying it's lame, and it is. I'm not going to sugarcoat it, AMD dropped the ball on this for gamers and that's who they marketed it to. I didn't even care about the price performance, I wanted a decent upgrade for the Phenom II X6s and every review of the CPU that is out there shows that it was a sidegrade at best.

As you can see by the board I am presently using, I fell hard for their decent marketing. I take full accountability for that because I know it was my own stupidity, but I am going to call a turd a turd when talking about the CPU.

Actually bd comic value is awesome I would have been sure by now we'd run out of jokes or gotten tired of making jokes but man...there just dosent seem to be an end to it....what great head room.

 

[cdawall]

Of course.... Dual core optimiser was more of a patch that helped 'sync' some programs that had some timing issues when it came to dual core.

A good example of this would be CoD:UO - the first map in the SP stage where your in the forrest. sometimes things wont spawn or scripts that are ment to happen at a certain time dont happen at all.

It didnt really boost performance of Windows per se but when it came to programs that need to bypass Windows API for timing thus fixing some of the problems some games were having.

plus even WITHOUT the dual core optimiser patch installed, it hardly made a difference to benchmarks at all in my experience. you could live without it and never know it existed.

People are looking at this patch from M$ like its some holy grail of patches and its gonna bring balance to the force when its not going to do shit all. If M$ are truely capable of making a CPU shine just by patching it then why the hell would we need such powerful processors??? We could buy any cheap ass low-end multicored CPU and just have M$ write a patch that optimises the hell out of it.

With that being said... you could put Michael Schumacher in a banged up Ford Cortina and he will drive like a boss and put on a world class performance, but at the same time. he wont win any races. because a driver is only as good as his car. and the car totally sucks at this juncture of all junctures.

Because there is a huge difference between a cheap Q6600 and an FX. Thread scheduling should be completely different as the way they are set up is completely different. I am not saying the patch will be the holy grail I am saying its not a "cheat" its a fix becuase the current task scheduling is not designed for a Bulldozer. This is no different than the task scheduling changes that have been built into windows from its various versions. I would put money a quad on windows 95 would behave completely different from windows 98, 2K, NT, XP, Vista and 7.

 

[theJesus]

I would put money a quad on windows 95 would behave completely different from windows 98, 2K, NT, XP, Vista and 7.

Now I want to try installing 95 on my machine just for the lulz.

 

[eidairaman1]

Now I want to try installing 95 on my machine just for the lulz.

you will have to pull some of that ram out, 98 supports 1.5Gigs at most if im not mistaken

 

[qubit]

you will have to pull some of that ram out, 98 supports 1.5Gigs at most if im not mistaken

Oh crap, I've got 16 gigs of the stuff in my new Sandy build! and 4 of it is in a single module. Also, Win95 had a bug in it, where it would crash at initial bootup if the processor was too fast - and we're talking about ancient Petium 400MHz CPU's here, let alone the monsters we have today. But Microsoft had a fix for it - yay! Download the exe from their website and boot into your new Windows 95. Run it to automatically unpack the installer and apply the patch in one step... can you see a problem with this? I kid you not. :shadedshu

 

[theJesus]

lol, there is a very good reason I said "try". I'm not going to anyways; I know it would be hell just getting it to recognize even the simplest of things.

 

[qubit]

lol, there is a very good reason I said "try". I'm not going to anyways; I know it would be hell just getting it to recognize even the simplest of things.

Oh yeah, hell indeed.

There is actually a way round this Win95 glitch: slow down the processor or boot it up on a very slow processor eg 200MHz Pentium or 486. Let Windows sort itself out with the drivers, then run the patch, then run on the fast system again and it should work. I know this works, because I remember going through this hassle a decade ago, lol. It's almost like Microsoft deliberately made the patch into a catch 22 situation to discourage Win95 use. Bad Microsoft!

You remember what the problem was? A timing loop overflowed. Apparently, some little counter in the bowls of Windows would wrap around through zero if the CPU was too quick and cause a blue screen.

 

[pantherx12]

the worst thing is im not trying to troll lol

You realise a design like bulldozers has never been done before right?

Whilst I'm not expecting miracles a software patch could easily bump up results 10%

Whilst it still won't be beating Intel chips that a nice boost and makes the fx8120 very competitively priced.

Considering even with the unfinished leaked patched ( only half of it) got me a 7% higher cine-bench single core score maybe even 10-15% wouldn't be crazy.

 

[Hamlet]

The conclusion I take away from this well-done review is:
CPU doesn't matter once you go to 1920x1200 (which should be the MINIMUM resolution for ANYONE who buys a HD7970...
I mean, come on?

However, once you go up there, the CPU becomes negligible.
I've read some previews which show that Windows8 will be much better suited for taking advantage of the Bulldozer architecture... so I guess the results will even be closer...


Suggestion:
In the resume, I'd loved to see a comment on the fact that some games seem to be so tight, that there is barely a difference while others are showing much larger gaps between the 3 CPUs.
Are those the (shoddily programmed) games that only use 1 core (so that Intel wins by IPC)?


As I'm not in the market for 500€ video cards, I'll pass the HD7970 anyway.
Looking forward to seeing the new 7870/7850!

 

[bear jesus]

You game at a resolution I can only dream of.

I hate you.

End.

j/k

Oh and 1280x1024? I play at 640x480 sometimes just for that 'pixellated experience'.

Ah 640x480, reminds me of the 90's

I only have 1,196,000 more pixels than 2560x1600 but it cost less than £600 for the 6970 and 3 22" monitors, many spend that on a GPU or monitor alone, i admit the screens use very cheap panels so don't compare to a £600 monitor but the 5,292,000 colourful flashing pixels filling my vision more than make up for it to me /end gloat

But i have dug myself an expensive hole, as the results show the higher the res the less the CPU plays a part and the more GPU power needed and in the case of DX11 games a 6970 just can't cut it with everything including AA maxed out, even the 7970 seams like just about enough, although with a little overclock and at my silly res the 7970 catches up with the 6990 and 590 yet all three are only just enough to max out some DX11 games above 2560x1600 and in some cases they are still not enough so it will take at least a water cooled 1.1 GHZ+ 7970 to dig me out of this.

OK I'm a very lucky bear

 

[pantherx12]

Ah 640x480, reminds me of the 90's

I only have 1,196,000 more pixels than 2560x1600 but it cost less than £600 for the 6970 and 3 22" monitors, many spend that on a GPU or monitor alone, i admit the screens use very cheap panels so don't compare to a £600 monitor but the 5,292,000 colourful flashing pixels filling my vision more than make up for it to me /end gloat

But i have dug myself an expensive hole, as the results show the higher the res the less the CPU plays a part and the more GPU power needed and in the case of DX11 games a 6970 just can't cut it with everything including AA maxed out, even the 7970 seams like just about enough, although with a little overclock and at my silly res the 7970 catches up with the 6990 and 590 yet all three are only just enough to max out some DX11 games above 2560x1600 and in some cases they are still not enough so it will take at least a water cooled 1.1 GHZ+ 7970 to dig me out of this.

OK I'm a very lucky bear

You just seen the news post about the saphire cards.

Try 1.3ghz + on your 7970

 

[bear jesus]

You just seen the news post about the saphire cards.

Try 1.3ghz + on your 7970

I just noticed it after posing

 

[pantherx12]

Someone needs to get me one of these cards, or give me a job so I can get one myself!

This + new WC set up would last me a pretty long time I reckon

5ghz + Bulldozer and 1.45ghz* 7970 ploz.

*Or as close to as possible.

These days unless I get a 50% over clock I'm not happy