Choosing a Gaming CPU at 1440p: Adding in Haswell
by Ian Cutress on June 4, 2013 10:00 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
While not necessarily a game on everybody’s lips, Sleeping Dogs is a strenuous game with a pretty hardcore benchmark that scales well with additional GPU power. The team over at Adrenaline.com.br are supreme for making an easy to use benchmark GUI, allowing a numpty like me to charge ahead with a set of four 1440p runs with maximum graphical settings.
One 7970
Sleeping Dogs seems to tax the CPU so little that the only CPU that falls behind by the smallest of margins is an E6400 (and the G465 which would not run the benchmark). Intel visually takes all the top spots, but AMD is all in the mix with less than 0.5 FPS splitting an X2-555 BE and an i7-3770K.
Two 7970s
A split starts to develop between Intel and AMD again, although you would be hard pressed to choose between the CPUs as everything above an i3-3225 scores 50-56 FPS. The X2-555 BE unfortunately drops off, suggesting that Sleeping Dogs is a fan of the cores and this little CPU is a lacking.
Three 7970s
At three GPUs the gap is there, with the best Intel processors over 10% ahead of the best AMD. Neither PCIe lane allocation or memory seems to be playing a part, just a case of threads then single thread performance.
Four 7970s
Despite our Beast machine having double the threads, an i7-3960X in PCIe 3.0 mode takes top spot.
It is worth noting the scaling in Sleeping Dogs. The i7-3960X moved from 28.2 -> 56.23 -> 80.85 -> 101.15 FPS, achieving +71% increase of a single card moving from 3 to 4. This speaks of a well written game more than anything.
One 580
There is almost nothing to separate every CPU when using a single GTX 580.
Two 580s
Same thing with two GTX 580s – even an X2-555 BE is within 1 FPS (3%) of an i7-3960X.
Sleeping Dogs Conclusion
Due to the successful scaling and GPU limited nature of Sleeping Dogs, almost any CPU you throw at it will get the same result. When you move into three GPUs or more territory, it seems that having the single thread CPU speed of an Intel processor gets a few more FPS at the end of the day.
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Mobilus - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
The problem isn't Haswell, the problem is the mainboard. You would need a mainboard that supports dual-link and at least with the older generations that feature wasn't implemented. Unless the usual suspects changed that with their new offerings, you will have to use a displayport to dvi adapter to get that resolution without a dedicated card (hdmi on mainboards is usually restricted to 1080p as well, unless... see above).K_Space - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I know Anandtech hasn't got to review the Richland desktop variants yet; but surely if the current recommendation is a trinity APU, surely a >10% performance increase and a lower TDP would clench it for Richland?The newly launched top end A8 6600K is £20 more than the A8 5600K.... but that's launch price.
MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Please, for the love of god, add a game like Crysis 3 or Far Cry 3. Your current games are all very old, and you will see a bigger difference in newer games.garrun - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Agree with request for Crysis 3. It has enough options to deliver a great visual experience and GPU beating, and it also scales well to multi-monitor resolutions for testing at extremes.BrightCandle - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
gamegpu.ru have done a lot of testing on all games with a variety of CPUs. Anandtech's choice of games actually edge cases. Once you start looking at a wider list of games (Just do a few CPUs but lots of games) you'll see a much bigger trend of performance difference especially in a lot of the non AAA titles. Around 50% of games show a preference for 3930k's at this point over a 2600k, so more multithreading is start to appear but you need to test a lot more games or you wont catch that trend and instead come to a misleading conclusion.ninjaquick - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I am not sure that the CPU is used any more in more recent games. This is a CPU test, and testing older games that are known to be CPU dependent is a must.Moving forward, with the next gen consoles that is, testing the absolute newest multiplatform games will be a bit more relevant. However, even Farcry 3 and Crysis 3 are mostly GPU bound, so there will be little to no difference in performance by changing the CPUs out.
superjim - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Was thinking the same. Tomb Raider, BF3, Crysis 3, hell even Warhead would be good.garrun - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I think Supreme Commander or Supreme Commander 2 would make an excellent CPU demo. Those games have been, and remain CPU limited in a way no other games are, and for good reasons (complexity, AI, unit count), rather than poor coding. A good way to do this is to record a complex 8 player game against AI and then play it back at max speed, timing the playback. That benchmark responds pretty much 1:1 with clock speed increases and also has a direct improvement effect on gameplay when dealing with large, complex battles with thousands of units on map. The upcoming Planetary Annihilation should also be a contender for this, but isn't currently in a useful state for benchmarking.Traciatim - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I kind of hope Planetary Annihilation will have both server and client benchmarks available, since this seems like it would be a pretty amazing platform for benchmarking.IanCutress - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Interesting suggestion - is SupCom2 still being updated for performance in drivers? Does playback come out with the time automatically or is it something I'll have to try and code with a batch file. Please email me with details if you would like, I've never touched SupCom2 before.Ian