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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yougotkicked - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
this sounds quite interesting, though I wonder if the AI is runtime bound rather than solution bound, as this could make the testing somewhat nondeterministic.To clarify what I mean; a common method in AI programming is to let algorithms continue searching for better and better solution, interrupting the algorithm when a time limit has passed and taking the best solution it has found so far. Such approaches can result in inconsistent gameplay when pitting multiple AI units against each other, which may change the game state too much between trials to serve as a good testing platform.
Even if the AI does use this approach it may not bias the results enough to matter, so I guess the only way to be sure is to run the tests a few times and see how consistent the results are on a single test system.
Zoeff - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Forget about SupCom2 - That game has been scaled down quite a bit compared to SupCom1 and isn't as demanding to CPUs. There's also an active SupCom1 community that has and still is pushing out community made patches. :-)SupCom actually has a build-in benchmark that plays a scripted map with some fancy camera work. Anyone can launch this by adding "/map perftest" to your shortcut. That said, it doesn't seem to be working properly anymore after several patches nor does it actually give any useful data as the sim score is capped at 10k for today's CPUs. And yet it's extremely easy to cripple any CPU you throw at it when simply playing the game. Just open up an 81x81km map with 7 AI enemies and watch your computer slow to a crawl as the map starts filling up.
And yes, the AI is "solution bound". Replays of recorded games with AI in them wouldn't work otherwise.
I wonder if somebody could create a custom SupCom1 benchmark... *Hint Hint*
FBB - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
They've had over 5 million concurrent online users. The total number will be much higher.DanNeely - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
What exactly does Steam count as online? Does just having the client sit in my tray count; or do I need to be playing a steam game at the time to be counted?wicko - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Definitely just signed in: 823,220 Players In-Game | 4,309,324 Players OnlineSource: http://steamcommunity.com/
chizow - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Thanks for the tests, there's a lot of data points in there so that's always appreciated.I would've liked to have seen some higher perf Nvidia solutions in there though, at the very least some Kepler parts. It looks like a lot of the higher end Intel parts hit a GPU bottleneck at the top, which is not unexpected at 1440p with last-gen Fermi parts.
What it does show for sure is, you may give pause to going beyond 2-way CF/SLI if you have to go lower than x8 on that 3rd slot. Which means you will probably have to shell out for one of the pricier boards. Hard not to recommend X79 at this point for 3-way or higher, although the lack of official PCIe 3.0 support was a red flag for me.
I went with the Gigabyte Z87x UD4 because I don't ever intend to go beyond 2-way SLI and the 3rd slot being x4 (2.0) was better than the x8/x4/x4 (3.0) config on most boards, which gives me the option to run a PhsyX card and retain x8/x8 (3.0) for my two main cards.
Gunbuster - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
So I'll stick with my 2600K @4.5ghz and continue to ponder what new Korean 27" LCD to get. Tech is pretty boring at the moment.wicko - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I haven't bothered overclocking my 2600K and I still feel it's plenty powerful. I think I may get a second GTX 670 though, Metro Last Light doesn't run all that great at 2560x1440.kallogan - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Haswell, haswell, haswell. Making one paper per day about it will not make it better. Boring cpu gen. Wake me up when something interesting shows up.chizow - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
So I guess the solution is to just ignore the launch to placate all those who have no interest in the launch, rather than post reviews and info about it for the ones that actually do? Doesn't make a lot of sense.If it doesn't interest you, move along.