A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| AnandTech | Low Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Low Qual |
High Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Max Qual |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Another consistent test, with the Core i7 and Core i5 sitting just behind Intel's Comet Lake i5.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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realbabilu - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
That Larger cache maybe need specified optimized BLAS.Kurosaki - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Did you mean BIAS?ballsystemlord - Tuesday, November 3, 2020 - link
BLAS == Basic Linear Algebra System.Kamen Rider Blade - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I think there is merit to having Off-Die L4 cache.Imagine the low latency and high bandwidth you can get with shoving some stacks of HBM2 or DDR-5, whichever is more affordable and can better use the bandwidth over whatever link you're providing.
nandnandnand - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I'm assuming that Zen 4 will add at least 2-4 GB of L4 cache stacked on the I/O die.ichaya - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Waiting for this to happen... have been since TR1.nandnandnand - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Throw in an RDNA 3 chiplet (in Ryzen 6950X/6900X/whatever) for iGPU and machine learning, and things will get really interesting.ichaya - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Yep.dotjaz - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
That's definitely not happening. You are delusional if you think RDNA3 will appear as iGPU first.At best we can hope the next I/O die to intergrate full VCN/DCN with a few RDNA2 CUs.
dotjaz - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Also doubly delusional if think think RDNA3 is any good for ML. CDNA2 is designed for that.Adding powerful iGPU to Ryzen 9 servers literally no purpose. Nobody will be satisfied with that tiny performance. Guaranteed recipe for instant failure.
The only iGPU that would make sense is a mini iGPU in I/O die for desktop/video decoding OR iGPU coupled with low end CPU for an complete entry level gaming SOC aka APU. Chiplet design almost makes no sense for APU as long as GloFo is in play.