A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Low Qual |
High Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Max Qual |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Another consistent test, with the Core i7 and Core i5 sitting just behind Intel's Comet Lake i5.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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Leeea - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
great reviewsadly i7-5775C's are still selling for $100+ on ebay. Not quite worth the upgrade over the i7-4790K, with graphics cards continuing to be by far the largest factor.
But to me it also shows there is no need to jump into the latest and greatest cpu, because these old cpus are still keeping up just fine.
plonk420 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
> sadly i7-5775C's are still selling for $100+ on ebayohhhh, that makes me curious as to how they compare to 3100/3300X chips now
Roy2002 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
So the conclusion is Optane could play a big role in future?Leeea - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
no.Optane is slower then normal RAM.
Optane is a faster more limited version of an SSD. Specifically it has RAM like read performance in some areas, while having SSD like write performance in other areas.
Jorgp2 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
SSDs are much slower than Optane in writes.The worst case performance for Optane is better than the best performance for an SSD in writes.
FunBunny2 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
"The worst case performance for Optane is better than the best performance for an SSD in writes."may haps Optane will optimize when used with code compiled to use only memory-to-memory execution and no hard I/O?
Tomatotech - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I would have loved to see Intel embed a couple of gig of Optane on every mobo or in every CPU - at scale it would have been cheap - and we would get the benefits of instant app start, damn fast reboot etc. That would make a bigger difference to the end user experience than 15% on benchmarks. But no, it came out with poorly implemented tiering software, via expensive almost unused add-in cards. Optane had so much mass-market potential, sadly I think it’s screwed now for use outside the datacentre. Intel of all people should know how tiered storage works, why did they screw it up so badly? They even had a shining example in Apple’s Fusion drive to follow (copy) but still messed it up.Jorgp2 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Have you considered asking supermicro for a skylake GT4e review sample?f00f - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
That's intel's vision of "embedded" DRAM which is only a kind of embedded, because it is on a separate die. If you look for a proper implementation, look at POWER7 processor (2010) with L3 as eDRAM on the same die as cores.jospoortvliet - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
I am a bit surprised amd didn't embed 32 or 64mb memory in the i/o chip... that would probably be relatively easy and affordable.