Date:
Monday , January 22, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Real-World Gaming CPU Comparison with 8800 GTX SLI

AMD and Intel head-to-head. With NVIDIA's 8800 series GPU supplying a big jump in performance over the last generation of video cards, we revisit just what these CPUs do for you when you are gaming. Is one truly better? The results have changed.

Introduction

By: Kyle Bennett

I asked Brent to allow me to write the introduction page and contribute to our conclusions. In the past, I think some of our real world CPU gaming articles have not been fully understood by some of our readers, which is totally understandable considering the way we do our testing is far from conventional.

The last time we did this, we upset off a bunch of people while a lot of others were glad to see something just like this. That go around, it was part of our Intel Core 2 Gaming Performance article. In the last year, when it comes to comparing processors and what performance they supply to you when gaming, we started changing up the way we looked at things. Much the way we started using real gaming experiences to evaluate video cards, HardOCP started applying the same focus to processors.

Canning the Benchmarks

We all saw tons of benchmarks last year when it came to Intel's new Core 2 Duo processors. We also saw Intel evangelize canned benchmarks that claimed up to 40% better gaming performance compared to the competition. But when HardOCP put the real world ruler to gaming between the processors, we saw little difference in the quality of experience truly supplied. What we saw was that there would be likely no way for a user to differentiate their experience between processors when playing games.

We have proven here that the flurry of canned benchmarks based on timedemos showing huge gains with Core 2 processors are virtually worthless in rating the true gaming performance of these processors today. The fact of the matter is that real-world gaming performance today greatly lies at the feet of your video card. Almost none of today’s games are performance limited by your CPU. Maybe that will change, but given the trends, it is not likely. You simply do not need a $1000 CPU to get great gaming performance as we proved months ago in our CPU Scaling article.

To be fair to Intel, AMD has done these types of canned benchmark gaming comparisons in the past as well, but at the time Intel was a press juggernaut relying on canned benchmarks to sing the praises of the Core 2 Duo.

Up In Arms

Many folks were up in arms screaming that we were doing nothing but bottlenecking the systems with the GPU. Well, certainly that is what we ended up seeing, but that was not what we were focusing on doing specifically. We took one high end system using an Intel CPU and another using an AMD CPU. We then ratcheted up the eye candy and resolutions in games to decide which processor provided a better gaming experience. What we found out was that there was little difference between gaming with these CPUs in the real world. Would one give you better benchmark numbers? Certainly, but unless you use your computer to play canned benchmarks, what does it matter?

Now, since I am picking on Intel a bit above, it is only fair to say that the Core 2 Duo did prove to be an overall better CPU than AMD’s in many other arenas. An Intel Core 2 Duo is going to make it into my next system build, but that choice will be based on many things and gaming performance advantage will likely not be the main reason for that choice. I point this out to hopefully quell some of the “YOU AMD FANBOY!!!” cries before they happen.

What’s in a Video Card?

In our last article we also took some criticism for not using a high-end CrossFire video card configuration, which was certainly a consideration we looked at. Given CrossFire’s poor market penetration and instability we had experienced in the past, we just did not feel as though it was an experience that would ring true as “real world” with most of our readers, and we also felt as though complications would slow down our testing. Whether you see that as wrong or right, that is how we viewed it.

Today we are gaming with two BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX in a SLI configuration. I would expect that this time around there would be no criticism placed on our video card choice and configuration as it is surely the leader in the world right now when it comes to gaming performance. If there is any consumer video card setup that will allow us to expose CPU bottlenecks in gaming, this is it.

What We Hope to Accomplish

We thought it was time to upgrade our system configuration and visit real world gaming on our PCs again. Given that gaming has yet to truly embrace multi-core CPUs, we are going to pit AMD’s high end Socket AM2 Athlon 64 FX-62 (2.8GHz) against Intel’s Core 2 Duo X6800 (2.93GHz). The systems are “identical” with our CPUs being isolated to see if one or the other gives a better gaming experience. To compare, what we do is play games with them, just like you would at home. We scale up the resolution on high end displays then see which system will allow us to turn on more eye candy, if any. You will see charts that represent our experience and give you a no-nonsense “Gameplay Advantages” section that hammer home exactly that. Our experiences this time are different and we think our methods supply our readers with some great information that should be useful to you when you are buying or building your next computer.