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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actionjksn - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
AMD Nailpuller? That was some funny shit right there HA HA HASpam not Spam - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Just skimmed the review; not as awesome as I had hoped for, sadly. That being said, I'm thinking it might well be a nice improvement for the stock, C2D Q6600 in my Dell. I could go Intel, obviously, but... I dunno. I've got an odd fascination with novel things, even if they are rough to begin with. Hell, I've even got a WP7 phone :pwolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Then make sure to get a quality power supply and motherboard to go with it. Also, your power bill will increase, but not directly from the Bulldozer CPU, nope, but from all the heat that it will make... you will need to run your air conditioner which is a power hog./* Patiently waiting for AMD's next gen architecture codenamed "Bendover" */
ckryan - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Is 'ScrewdOver' next on the roadmap after 'Bendover'? I'll have to look in the official AMD leaked slide repository.I still think some intrepid AMD faithful will try BD out just because they're wired that way, and many of the are going to like it. I bet it compares better to Lynnfield than Sandy Bridge... Except Ivy Bridge is closer in the future than SB's launch is in the past. This could be an interesting and relevant product after a few years, but the need is dire now. AMD is going to kill off the Phenom II as fast as possible.
themossie - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Bendover -> ScrewdOver -> Screwdriver (I'll bring the OJ) -> Piledriver.Courtesy of numerous internal leaks at AMD.
themossie - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
My apologies, didn't realize Piledriver was real.bill4 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
AKA, the reason all of us who are commenting are reading this review. Gaming performance. And AMD chose not to even compete there. Bunch of monkey overs at AMD CPU engineering?It's now a non starter in the enthusiast market.
I've often though recently that AMD (or any manufacturer really, but AMD as a niche filler would be a more obvious choice given their market position) would do well to try to position itself as the gamers choice, and even design it's CPU's to excel in gaming at the expense of some other things at times. I really suspect this strategy would lead to a sales bonanza. Because really the one area consumers crave high performance is pretty much, only gaming. It's the one reason you actually want a really high performance CPU (provided you dont do some sort of specialized audio/video work), instead of just "good enough" which is fine for general purpose desktoping.
Instead they do the exact opposite with Bulldozer, facepalm. Bulldozer is objectively awful in gaming. Single handedly nobody who posts at any type of gaming or gaming related forum will ever buy one of these. Unbelievable.
Perhaps making it even more stinging is there was some pre-NDA lift supposed reviewer quote floating around at about how "Bulldozer will be the choice for gamers" or something like that. And naturally everybody got excited because, that's all most people care about.
Combine that with the fact it's much bigger and hotter than Intel's, it's almost a unmitigated disaster.
This throws AMD's whole future into question since apparently their future is based on this dog of a chip, and even makes me wonder how long before AMD's engineers corrupt the ATI wing and bring the GPU side to disaster? The ONLY positive thing to come out of it is that at least AMD is promising yearly improvements, key word promising. Even then absolute best case scenario is that they slowly fix this dog in stages, since it's clearly a broken architecture. And that's best case, and assumes they will even meet their schedule.
Anand lays so much of the blame at clockspeed, hinting AMD wanted much more. But even say, 4.3 ghz Bulldozer, would STILL be a dog in all important gaming, so there's little hope.
shompa - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I have used many AMD systems. Have deployed 1000 of AMD CPU inside Unix workstations at my old work. I cheer for AMD.But.
AMD is going to have a hard time ahead. Selling its fabs to Global foundries was the biggest mistake of them all.
We are in the post PC world. If Tablets are computers: 2012 20% of PCs will use ARM. This is many lost CPU sales for AMD/Intel.
I predict that AMD will be gone within 3 years. Maybe someone buys them? After the settlement with Intel, AMD now can transfer its X86 license to the next buyer. (pending Intels approval)
Maybe Google could buy AMD and build complete computers ?
wolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I see two things that might happen to AMD1) They will transform in to a GPU manufacturer completely (and of course they will make those silly APUs)
2) If that damn x86 license is transferable, they could merge with NVidia. Neither of these two companies looks to hot these days, so they might as well work together.
philosofool - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
We may be in the "post PC" era, but don't count x86 out. Recent studies indicate there's a corollary to Moore's law that applies to compute power per watt; the study goes back to 1961. This suggests that x86 is only a few years away from running on mobile devices, which is what MS and Intel are betting on. And frankly, it makes sense. Ultimately, I don't want two different things (a mobile device and a PC), I want a PC in my pocket and one on my desk.