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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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.