Bioshock Infinite

Bioshock Infinite is Irrational Games’ latest entry in the Bioshock franchise. Though it’s based on Unreal Engine 3 – making it our obligatory UE3 game – Irrational had added a number of effects that make the game rather GPU-intensive on its highest settings. As an added bonus it includes a built-in benchmark composed of several scenes, a rarity for UE3 engine games, so we can easily get a good representation of what Bioshock’s performance is like.

The 9th benchmark in our suite, our performance data is becoming increasingly consistent. Once more the GTX 760 surpasses the 7950B, this time by 7% at our highest 1080p settings, with both cards offering enough punch to pass 60fps. Meanwhile it’s not quite as close to the GTX 670 as it is in some other games, but nevertheless it’s another case of where the closest 600 series card is the GTX 670 and not the GTX 660 Ti.

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  • kishorshack - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    Looks like the GPU gains over a two year cycle is more than CPU gains
    Spending on GPU's is more worth while than Spending on CPU's
    Specially if you start from Sandy Bridge in CPU's
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    3D Rendering is a trivially parallelizable workload. As a result it can roughly double in performance with each full node process shrink just by keeping the core design the same but putting twice as many of them on the die. Real world behavior differs mostly in that some of the additional die space is used to enable things that weren't practical before instead of just making all the existing features twice as fast.
  • wumpus - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    That is only strictly true if you are willing to use twice as much electricity and generate/remove twice as much heat (it could approach costing twice as much as well, but not nearly as often). A good chunk of each update needs to go to making the GPU have a higher TFLOP/W or the thing will melt.
  • ewood - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    luckily many of those issues are mitigated by transition to a smaller process node, as DanNeeley said. your statement is more applicable to dual die cards, not new processors having twice the functional units.
  • maltanar - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    That is unfortunately no longer true, smaller processes do not benefit from the so-called 'Dennard scaling' anymore, without a lot of trickery from semiconductor engineers.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link

    They may have to work harder at it; but as long as they're able to continue doing what you refer to as trickery, the result for us end users is the same.
  • tential - Wednesday, June 26, 2013 - link

    CPU gains have been made, just not in performance. We don't need performance on the CPU side for a LOT of applications. Like I always say, if you had double the CPU performance, you still wouldn't gain much FPS in most games.

    Intel would be cannibalizing it's higher end processors if it kept making CPU gains. Instead, it focuses on power consumption, to fit better CPUs into smaller things such as notebooks, tablets, etc. Look at the Macbook Air Review and then tell me we haven't made CPU gains.
  • UltraTech79 - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    More worthwhile than what? What are you even talking about? Today's i5 chips arnt the bottleneck to any of the GPUs here in any game. So what you're saying is irrelevant.
  • ericore - Tuesday, July 2, 2013 - link

    Aint that the truth, the biggest change was from the 500 series to the 600 series.
    The 600 series make most radeons look like dinosaurs or AMD processors.
    Intel is dicking around giving us less than 10% speed inprovement in each generation.
    Can't wait for AMD to release their steamroller 8 core, except where latency is crucial it will match haswell and cost a fraction. Haswell will still technically be faster, but only in benchmarks, in practice they will be identical. The change from piledriver to steamroller is like from a a pentium 4 to a core 2 duo. It's not a new architecture, but has so many improvements that it ought to be called one.
  • MarcVenice - Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - link

    I checked all the games, and the first 4-5 games the 7950 Boost wins, the other the GTX 760 wins. I didn't add up the numbers, but are you guys sure the HD 7950 Boost is 8% slower overall?

    And what's anandtech's stance on frametimes/fcat? Are those only used when problems arise, new games? I realize they take a lot of time, but I think they can be quite valuable in determing which card is the fastest.

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