The Bulldozer Review: AMD FX-8150 Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 12, 2011 1:27 AM ESTGaming Performance
AMD clearly states in its reviewer's guide that CPU bound gaming performance isn't going to be a strong point of the FX architecture, likely due to its poor single threaded performance. However it is useful to look at both CPU and GPU bound scenarios to paint an accurate picture of how well a CPU handles game workloads, as well as what sort of performance you can expect in present day titles.
Civilization V
Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance.
While we're GPU bound in the full render score, AMD's platform appears to have a bit of an advantage here. We've seen this in the past where one platform will hold an advantage over another in a GPU bound scenario and it's always tough to explain. Within each family however there is no advantage to a faster CPU, everything is just GPU bound.
Looking at the no render score, the CPU standings are pretty much as we'd expect. The FX-8150 is thankfully a bit faster than its predecessors, but it still falls behind Sandy Bridge.
Crysis: Warhead
In CPU bound environments in Crysis Warhead, the FX-8150 is actually slower than the old Phenom II. Sandy Bridge continues to be far ahead.
Dawn of War II
We see similar results under Dawn of War II. Lightly threaded performance is simply not a strength of AMD's FX series, and as a result even the old Phenom II X6 pulls ahead.
DiRT 3
We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:
The FX-8150 doesn't do so well here, again falling behind the Phenom IIs. Under more real world GPU bound settings however, Bulldozer looks just fine:
Dragon Age
Dragon Age is another CPU bound title, here the FX-8150 falls behind once again.
Metro 2033
Metro 2033 is pretty rough even at lower resolutions, but with more of a GPU bottleneck the FX-8150 equals the performance of the 2500K:
Rage vt_benchmark
While id's long awaited Rage title doesn't exactly have the best benchmarking abilities, there is one unique aspect of the game that we can test: Megatexture. Megatexture works by dynamically taking texture data from disk and constructing texture tiles for the engine to use, a major component for allowing id's developers to uniquely texture the game world. However because of the heavy use of unique textures (id says the original game assets are over 1TB), id needed to get creative on compressing the game's textures to make them fit within the roughly 20GB the game was allotted.
The result is that Rage doesn't store textures in a GPU-usable format such as DXTC/S3TC, instead storing them in an even more compressed format (JPEG XR) as S3TC maxes out at a 6:1 compression ratio. As a consequence whenever you load a texture, Rage needs to transcode the texture from its storage codec to S3TC on the fly. This is a constant process throughout the entire game and this transcoding is a significant burden on the CPU.
The Benchmark: vt_benchmark flushes the transcoded texture cache and then times how long it takes to transcode all the textures needed for the current scene, from 1 thread to X threads. Thus when you run vt_benchmark 8, for example, it will benchmark from 1 to 8 threads (the default appears to depend on the CPU you have). Since transcoding is done by the CPU this is a pure CPU benchmark. I present the best case transcode time at the maximum number of concurrent threads each CPU can handle:
The FX-8150 does very well here, but so does the Phenom II X6 1100T. Both are faster than Intel's 2500K, but not quite as good as the 2600K. If you want to see how performance scales with thread count, check out the chart below:
Starcraft 2
Starcraft 2 has traditionally done very well on Intel architectures and Bulldozer is no exception to that rule.
World of Warcraft
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GatorLord - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Consider what AMD is and what AMD isn't and where computing is headed and this chip is really beginning to make sense. While these benches seem frustrating to those of us on a desktop today I think a slightly deeper dive shows that there is a whole world of hope here...with these chips, not something later.I dug into the deal with Cray and Oak Ridge, and Cray is selling ORNL massively powerful computers (think petaflops) using Bulldozer CPUs controlling Nvidia Tesla GPUs which perform the bulk of the processing. The GPUs do vastly more and faster FPU calculations and the CPU is vastly better at dishing out the grunt work and processing the results for use by humans or software or other hardware. This is the future of High Performance Computing, today, but on a government scale. OK, so what? I'm a client user.
Here's what: AMD is actually best at making GPUs...no question. They have been in the GPGPU space as long as Nvidia...except the AMD engineers can collaborate on both CPU and GPU projects simultaneously without a bunch of awkward NDAs and antitrust BS getting in the way. That means that while they obviously can turn humble server chips into supercomputers by harnessing the many cores on a graphics card, how much more than we've seen is possible on our lowly desktops when this rebranded server chip enslaves the Ferraris on the PCI bus next door...the GPUs.
I get it...it makes perfect sense now. Don't waste real estate on FPU dies when the one's next door are hundreds or thousands of times better and faster too. This is not the beginning of the end of AMD, but the end of the beginning (to shamlessely quote Churchill). Now all that cryptic talk about a supercomputer in your tablet makes sense...think Llano with a so-so CPU and a big GPU on the same die with some code tweaks to schedule the GPU as a massive FPU and the picture starts taking shape.
Now imagine a full blown server chip (BD) harnessing full blown GPUs...Radeon 6XXX or 7XXX and we are talking about performance improvements in the orders of magnitude, not percentage points. Is AMD crazy? I'm thinking crazy like a fox.
Oh..as a disclaimer, while I'm long AMD...I'm just an enthusiast like the rest of you and not a shill...I want both companies to make fast chips that I can use to do Monte Carlos and linear regressions...it just looks like AMD seems to have figured out how to play the hand they're holding for change...here's to the future for us all.
olafmetal - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Would it be possible to benchmark Civ V's turn duration (or level creation or load times)?That would be a more cpu dependent measurement then frame rates I would think.
artemisgoldfish - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
It's like Barcelona all over again. OMG THIS IS GOING TO BE SO GREAT and then an underwhelming part.James5mith - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
This is a sad day. The Bulldozer design is basically AMD repeating Intel's mistakes. They were able to zip past Intel back then because Intel focused on clockspeed, and they focused on IPC. Now it seems to be the other way around."Those who do not learn from history...."
hasu - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
"Heavily threaded workloads obviously do well on the FX series parts, here in our 7-zip test the FX-8150 is actually faster than Intel's fastest Sandy Bridge"We work on a product which is heavily multi-threaded (around 90 threads on one component). Wondering if FX-8150 would be a better bet to lower hardware costs.
tynopik - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
first page: Bulldozer patsSunagwa - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
After such a long wait I feel so....underwhelmed...I was hoping for something competitive that would force Intel to lower there prices or make me want to buy an AMD CPU. Oh well, off to buy my 2600k.
dervisionar - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
(first post, btw)very disappointing performance. I'm in 100% agreement with everyone displeased about the single threaded performance and find it laughable that they'd think performance would be gimped because Win7 doesn't use the cores properly.
I'm actually a fan of the A8-Llano series of processors and wanted to see what the hybrids of Bulldozer with an integrated 6700 or 6800 series AMD Graphics would be like. Think about it: it could have been a media center from hell's dream chip. "Good Enough" graphics for gaming, HD acceleration, and plenty of PCI-E slots on a mATX to pop in as many satellite, OTA, and/or digicable tuners to make you sick. And have the main heat generators all cooled by one trick water/copper air cooler. That would have been pretty sweet.
But they're going to have alot of tweaks to do to make this competitive for anyone, myself included, to want to commit to it. I've been an AMD user ever since the K6-II days when they were at intel's heels and up to the 939 days. But then I finally went Intel Wolfdale and currently have a 2600K. They have a good thing with the purchased ATI offerings... but in order to sell fusion, the other piece they're "fusing" into the chip needs to be enticing.
Ramshambo2001 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
This is just a sad. I was really hoping a comeback for AMD with this architecture.HalloweenJack - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
been reading the scheduling in both windows7 and linux kernal is a mess for bulldozer and when theres a patch performance will improve. any truth to this? its what i`ve read over on XS