Choosing a Gaming CPU at 1440p: Adding in Haswell
by Ian Cutress on June 4, 2013 10:00 AM ESTCivilization V
A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. We test at 1440p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.
One 7970
Civilization V is the first game where we see a gap when comparing processor families. A big part of what makes Civ5 perform at the best rates seems to be PCIe 3.0, followed by CPU performance – our PCIe 2.0 Intel processors are a little behind the PCIe 3.0 models. By virtue of not having a PCIe 3.0 AMD motherboard in for testing, the bad rap falls on AMD until PCIe 3.0 becomes part of their main game.
Two 7970s
The power of PCIe 3.0 is more apparent with two 7970 GPUs, however it is worth noting that only processors such as the i5-2500K and above have actually improved their performance with the second GPU. Everything else stays relatively similar.
Three 7970s
More cores and PCIe 3.0 are winners here, but no GPU configuration has scaled above two GPUs.
Four 7970s
Again, no scaling.
One 580
While the top end Intel processors again take the lead, an interesting point is that now we have all PCIe 2.0 values for comparison, the non-hyper threaded 2500K takes the top spot, 10% higher than the FX-8350.
Two 580s
We have another Intel/AMD split, by virtue of the fact that none of the AMD processors scaled above the first GPU. On the Intel side, you need at least an i5-2500K to see scaling, similar to what we saw with the 7970s.
Civilization V conclusion
Intel processors are the clear winner here, though not one stands out over the other. Having PCIe 3.0 seems to be the positive point for Civilization V, but in most cases scaling is still out of the window unless you have a monster machine under your belt.
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UltraTech79 - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
This article is irrelevant to 95+% of people. What was the point in this? I don't give a rats ass what will be in 3-5 years, I want to know performance numbers for using a setup with realistic numbers of TODAY.Useless.
core4kansan - Monday, July 15, 2013 - link
While I appreciate the time and effort you put into this, I have to agree with those who call out 1440p's irrelevance for your readers. I think if we tested at sane resolutions, we'd find that a low-end cpu, like a G2120, coupled with a mid-to-high range GPU, would yield VERY playable framerates at 1080p. I'd love to see some of the older Core 2 Duos up against the likes of a G2120, i3-3220/5, on up to i5-3570 and higher with a high end GPU and 1080p res. That would be very useful info for your readers and could save many of them lots of money. In fact, wouldn't you rather put your hard-earned money into a better GPU if you knew that you could save $200 on the cpu? I'm hinting that I believe (without seeing actual numbers) that a G2120+high end GPU would perform virtually identically in gaming to a $300+ cpu with the same graphics accelerator, at 1080p. Sure, you'd see see greater variation between the cpus at 1080p, but when we're testing cpus, don't we WANT that?lackynamber - Friday, August 9, 2013 - link
Some people dont really know what they are reading...apparently!!The fact that in every single review someone says anandtech is being paid by someone is actually a good thing. I mean, a month ago a bunch of people said they are trying to sell Intel cpus, and now we have people saying the same shit about AMD.
Furthermore, the whole benchmark is based around 1440p! Calling it bullshit because it is a small niche that has such a monitor is stupid. No body has Titan either, should they not benchmark it? No one runs quad sli either and so on.
Even the guy that flamed Ian admitted that the benchmark bottlenecks the CPU so it makes AMD look better. WELL THATS THE FUCKING POINT. Amd LOOKS better cause it fucking is, taking into consideration that, as long as you have a single card, YOU DONT FUCKING NEED ANY BETTER CPU. That what the review pointed.
All the benchmark and Ian's reccomendation was, that, for 1440p and one video card, since the gpu is already bottlenecking the cpu, get the cheapest you can, which in this case is amd's A8. I mean, why in fucking hell would I want an i7 on 10 ghz if it is left idle scratching balls cause of the GPU? I
zainab12345 - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
i have an amd 5450 gpu card and the game runs very slow. how to make my game very smoother while using this card. 'regards
https://hdpcgames.com/dirt-3-download-pc-game/
zainab12345 - Thursday, August 20, 2020 - link
running very smoothly using low end gpuhttps://hdpcgames.com
showbizclan - Saturday, June 26, 2021 - link
I wonder what they mean by "active".Most likely it's a number of users with steam client running.
Well, it runs idle for more than a year for me, yet I'm an "active" user I guess... https://showbizclan.com/japanese-comedy-movies/