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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HW_mee - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I did not expect Bulldozer to rock the CPU world, but....A Bulldozer has a 256 bit shared FPU which is capable of calculating 2x128 bit FP instructions at the same time vs 128 bit FPU per core in Phenom II
Bulldozer 8150 should be able to process 4x256 bit FP instructions or 8x128 bit FP instructions at a time, while Phenom II 1100T should be able to process 6x128 bit FP instructions at a time.
The short calculation above shows Bulldozer should have an advantage over Phenom II in FPU heavy computations.
The test don't lie and the two processors perform the same, but there should have been a difference, in theory.
HW_mee - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Need that EDIT button.... Bulldozer has a 256 bit shared FPU per module, which ...
Mr Alpha - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I believe Carmack mentioned during QuakeCon that the textures are compressed using Microsoft's HD Photo (aka Windows Media Photo).Ryan Smith - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Aha, I thought it was something like that, but I couldn't come up with the right keyword. Fixed. Thanks!IceDread - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
This is an utter failure from Amd. For a personal workstation or home computer there is simply no reason to choose Amd over Intel. There are even cases when the older Amd cpu is better, which to me looks insane.So we get nearly no new price pressure on the market from this ether. It's just like a silent release, the market wont notice and the customers wont notice that there is a new Amd cpu on the market because the cpu has nothing of interest it can offer. This is really disappointing.
cjs150 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
You have summed it up well.Worse performance, crap power consumption. Only way to save this is a big price cut say to $150-160.
The AMD approved water cooling system looks to be a gimmick, and I say this as someone who prefers water over air cooling. I do not see the point of CPU only watercooling - if that is all you want then air cooling is cheaper, almost as good and a heck of lot easier to install. IMO CPU+GPU is the minimum if you want to watercool, unless you are into overclocking when a single rad is too small
I guess AMD are rapidly becoming a niche player because as bad as BD is, intel's atom is worse compared to the AMD equivalent
IceDread - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
A very high price cut could save the product like you say but that might mean Amd will lose cash, thou it's not like they wont lose cash already being so far behind. I really do not see a place for this new cpu.This is bad thou, because we need competition on the market because otherwise Intel will only have to take customers willingness to pay a certain amount of cash for a cpu into account, there is no competition.
I like water cooling thou, but that is because I like to overclock some. Water cooling systems can also be more quite but not necessarily. Most people I do not believe will gain on a water cooling system, that would only increase the price of the product.
haplo602 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
yes there is. socker F and 2389 optys. they are dirt cheap right now :-) if you can get a mobo that supports 2439s then you are golden.g101 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I swear, you fucking kids are ridiculously stupid. Those of us that actually use CPU's to their full potential understand that this is far from a 'failure'. You gamer children haven't got a clue what 'future proofed' means.IceDread - Thursday, October 13, 2011 - link
Hey retard, there is no smooth way to utilize this cpu. Trty and realize that.There are few cases where strong cpu's are needed, servers, graphics, data processing and gaming. Most readers on this forum is probably gamers and thus writes from that perspective. Is that so hard to understand.
From my point of view as a solution developer of funds and insurance systems this cpu is not of interest because the alternatives for the servers are better and for client computers the need of a strong cpu is not of interest at all usually and thus this cpu is not of interest there ether.