A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Chernobylite
Despite the advent of recent TV shows like Chernobyl, recreating the situation revolving around the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the concept of nuclear fallout and the town of Pripyat have been popular settings for a number of games – mostly first person shooters. Chernobylite is an indie title that plays on a science-fiction survival horror experience and uses a 3D-scanned recreation of the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It involves challenging combat, a mix of free exploration with crafting and non-linear story telling. While still in early access, it is already picking up plenty of awards.
I picked up Chernobylite while still in early access, and was impressed by its in-game benchmark, showcasing complex building structure with plenty of trees and structures where aliasing becomes important. The in-game benchmark is an on-rails experience through the scenery, covering both indoor and outdoor scenes – it ends up being very CPU limited in the way it is designed. We have taken an offline version of Chernobylite to use in our tests, and we are testing the following settings combinations:
- 360p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages.
| AnandTech | Low Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Low Qual |
High Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Max Qual |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
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The Broadwell CPUs remain high performers here as the frame rates get cranked up, with the Broadwell Core i7+i5 even matching the latest Comet Lake Core i5, even at 1080p Max settings.
For our Integrated Tests, we run the first and last combination of settings.
Integrated graphics shows how far AMD's basic options are ahead.
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dsplover - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
For Digital s Audio applications the i7-5775C @ 3.3GHz was incredible when disabling the Iris GFX turning the cache over to audio, then running s discrete GFX card.Bested my i7 4790k’s.
Tried OC’ing but even with the kick but Supermicro H70 it was unstable as the Ring Bus/L4 would also clock up and choked @ 2050MHz.
This rig allowed really tight low latency timings and I prayed they would release future designs with a larger cache.
AMD beat them to to it w/Matisse which was good for 8 core only.
The new 5000s are going to be Digital Audio dreams @ low wattage.
Intel just keeps lagging behind.
ironicom - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
fps is irrelevant in civ; turn time and load time are what matter.vorsgren - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
Thanks for using my benchmark! Hope it was usefull!Nictron - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
Which benchmark was that?erotomania - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
Google the username.vorsgren - Wednesday, November 4, 2020 - link
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=173...Oxford Guy - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
"The Intel skew on this site is getting silly its becoming an Intel promo machine!"Yes. An article that exposes how much Intel was able to get away with sandbagging because of our tech world's lack of adequate competition (seen in MANY tech areas to the point where it's more the norm than the exception) — clearly such an article is showing Intel in a good light.
If you were an Intel shareholder.
For everyone else (the majority of the readers), the article condemns Intel for intentionally hobbing Skylake's gaming performance. ArsTechnica produced an article about this five years ago when it became clear that Skylake wasn't going to have EDRAM.
The ridiculousness of the situation (how Intel got away with charging premium prices for horribly hobbled parts — $10 worth of EDRAM missing, no less) really shows the world's economic system particularly poorly. For all the alleged capitalism in tech, there certainly isn't much competition. That's why Intel didn't have to ship Skylake with EDRAM. Monopolization (and near-monopoly) enables companies to do what they want to do more than anything else: sell less for more. As long as regulators are toothless and/or incompetent the situation won't improve much.
erikvanvelzen - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Ever since the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition I've wondered why intel does not permanently offer a top product with a large L3 or L4 cache.abufrejoval - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
Just picked up a NUC8i7BEH last week (quad i7, 48EU GT3e with 128MB eDRAM), because they dropped below €300 including VAT: A pretty incredible value at that price point and extremely compatible with just about any software you can throw at it.Yes, Tiger Lake NUC11 would be better on paper and I have tried getting a Ryzen 7-4800U (as PN50-BBR748MD), but I've never heard of one actually shipped.
It's my second NUC8i7BEH, I had gotten another a month or two previously, while it was still at €450, but decided to swap that against a hexa-core NUC10i7FNH (24EU no eDRAM) at the same price, before the 14-days zero-cost return period was up. GT3e+quad-core vs. GT2+hexa-core was a tough call to make, but acutally both run really mostly server loads anyway. But at €300/quad vs €450/hexa the GT3e is quite simply for free, when the silicon die area for the GT3e/quad is in all likelyhood much greater than for the GT2/hexa, even without counting the eDRAM.
My Whiskey-lake has 200MHz less top clock than the Comet-lake, but that doesn't show in single core results, where the L4 seems to put Whiskey consistently into a small lead.
GT3e doesn't quite manage to double graphics performance over GT2, but I am not planning to use either for gaming. Both do fairly well at 4k on anything 2D, even Google Map's 3D renders do pretty well.
BTW: While Google Earth Pro's Flight simulator actually gives a fairly accurate representation of the area where I live, it doesn't do great on FPS, even with an Nvidia GPU. By contrast Microsoft latest and greatest is a huge disappointment when it comes to terrain accuracy (buildings are pure fantasy, not related at all to what's actually there), but delivers ok FPS on my RTX2080ti. No, I didn't try FlightSim on the NUCs...
However, the 3D rendering pipeline Google has put into the browser variant of Google Maps, beats the socks off both Google Earth Pro and Microsoft Flight: With Chrome leading over Firefox significantly, the 3D modelled environment is mind-boggling even on the GT2 at 4k resolutions, it's buttery smooth on GT3e. A browser based flight simulator might actually give the best experience overall, quite hard to believe in a way.
It has me appreciate how good even iGPU graphics could be, if code was properly tuned to make do with what's there.
And it exposes just how bad Microsoft Flight is with nothing but Bing map data unterneath: Those €120 were a full waste of money, but I just saved those from buying the second NUC8 later.
mrtunakarya - Wednesday, December 9, 2020 - link
<a href="https://www.mrtunakarya.com/?m=1">Nice<...