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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dingetje - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
i agree with some that bulldozer is more like faildozer, but...let's keep supporting amd so the one getting piledrive'd in the naughty place will not be you when intel has zero competition left because you did not want to spend a little more for a little less....and let's be honest, it IS just a little.
if enough ppl drop amd, in the end WE will be the one paying for amd's lack of support.
at least amd is trying.....the question is, what are YOU going to do to stop intel becoming your bunghole-piledriving overlord?
wolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Supporting incompetence is like socialism (or even communism). Eventually those that are supported will sit around like dogs all day and do nothing but lick their hairy balls...dingetje - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
ah...someone has been brainwashed by watching to much fox news.communism baaaad boogabooga!! ....duhhhhh lol roflmao
sure, capitalism works...however, it only works when there actually IS competition.
i wish your (most likely already loose) rectum good luck.
wolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Apparently money won't motivate the Monkey Engineers at AMD, so maybe making fun of them will. I mean, where is their pride, right?By the way, I've seen real socialism, so I have a clue what it is. And it is what I just described. I don't like Intel because they are not healthy for our economy, yet their only competition just pulled a gigantic fuck-up.
dingetje - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
oooooo oooga boooga socialism is bad....it take away aaalll you money...it verrry baddd.....oooooogabooogaboooo!! LOLhave fun getting eaten alive by china after your capitalistic model became cancerous and will die from the inside out.
your country is bought and paid for and will be eaten alive by the "communistic" chinese who are in fact just the same as what the usa has become: a corporate dictatorship (not communism and certainly not socialism).
sorry, i didnt mean to scare you more than you obviously already are.
i would send you some lube to easy the pain, but i'm all out ;)
UberApfel - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
My god you're all so retarded...Dingetje; China has serious issues when it comes to the welfare of their people. China only owns 10% of our debt, and that is thanks to China becoming capitalistic as a nation.
Wolfman; Bulldozer is a server procressor. The server market is where the money is especially with the cloud and enthusiast-class desktops becoming rare. Intel has 30X AMD's market capital... they can afford to target multiple markets. AMD can't.
Bulldozer is superior with integer processing in both performance-per-core and performance-per-watt. Of course; I do wonder why desktop applications even need floating point... (numbers < -2^63 or > 2^63)
hasu - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Like wise... killing or trying to control competition is also communism.radium69 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Jeebus, that power consumption is going through the roof!Also there were some rumors that it would go up to 8Ghz, I wonder if would use a Kw by then...
I want to see how they compare to each other when overclocked to 4,5 or more or less.
Also Anand, can you do a efficiency test? Various overclocking speeds and bench these while monitoring the power consumption. Might make an interesting article :)
ypsylon - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
Not really - even including AMD fanboys. AMD can't understand that to move forward you must abolish old stuff for good. Brand new and spanking Bulldozer has it roots in ancient K6. Do something new for crying out loud or get lost and stop wasting time. Don't release CPUs just for the sake of offering something. That is not the point of CPU market. Even Intel can shoot themselves in the foot with X79. Looks like it will be similar failure to FailDozer. Nobody will invest in entirely new platform for 10 maybe 15% performance boost over X58 which is the new 775 socket. Long live the S1366! Plenty of life and fuel left in Nehalems, plenty... If you wanted to buy Bulldozer then go and buy X58 platform. After nearly 4 years on the market it is [somewhat ;)] dirt cheap.Anand one thing: I find it puzzling that you reckon that Bulldozer will do well in server environments. With that kind of performance/Watt and inefficient power management? No chance in hell. i7/Xenons will eat FailDozers for breakfast.
wolfman3k5 - Wednesday, October 12, 2011 - link
I'm not. I completely agree with everything that you've said.And, if I might add: Dear AMD, and dear AMD engineers (and lazy fucks that you are), throwing more cache at an already inefficient architecture is not going to solve your problem. Add to that that you people (yes, you AMD people) are calling a 4 Core CPU an 8 Core because you've added another Integer Unit to each core. WTF?! That's almost like calling a quad core Intel 2600K and 8 Core CPU because it has Hyper Threading.
I have been an avid AMD supporter since 1996. I have spent many thousands of dollars on your CPUs and other hardware that you people make. I'm done. Not another penny! Ever!