| Ramadear said:
You telling me to get more info before discussing graphics then you go on to tell me that the 7850 is a decent gpu? How ironic. Mantle has already shown what it can do. Its not about boosting the performance of gpus, its about getting rid of the cpu bottleneck. That is to say a AMD 7850k with a Radeon 290x would get almost the same performance as a I7 3770k with a 290x. Currently with dx11 and prior, this is not the case. The 7850k would be a bottleneck because it wouldn't be fast enough to feed the 290x. This is why with mantle when its used with a high end cpu and gpu, there is no huge performance gains. Because the cpu is already fast enough to feed the gpu. In other words if mantle continues to take off, it will make it so that one just has to focus on upgrading their gpu instead of worrying about getting a high end cpu and gpu. Google battlefield 4 and thief mantle benchmarks. The high end gpu/cpu performance doesn't matter, pay attention to the low end cpu with high end gpu benchmarks. Because that is what matters. And yes, the mantle api is similar to what is in consoles. How do you think its possible for the ps4/xo to have weak jaguar cpus but be able to pump out decent graphics. With a low level api, the cpu is no longer the bottleneck. Also, your statement about AMD drivers being bad is so outdated. When is the last time you built and gamed on a pc? 2001? Both Nvidia and AMD can have bad drivers. I own hardware from both and I've personally had more issues with Nvidia. But man, that kind of statement shows how out of touch with PC you are. And for you its more so about parroting and identification with your console system. You can't be a objective thinker if you are defending something as if its a part of you. |
CPUs aren't the bottleneck on PCs. Of course, if you can pump their performance, it's a good improvement. But it isn't the big issue here. I myself game with a almost 5 year old Phenom II 955 and it isn't an issue. I've already considered upgrading it, but benchmarks actually show that I would get more marginal upgrades (it would be better to grab a high-end cooler or watercooler and overclock it). A good AMD FX 8-core CPU is pretty cheap. Even with that, I would do a better service to myself using that money to replace my GTX650 with a beefier card. I don't think most gamer are thinking about using Titans with a Core i3 to make that a revolution simply because decent CPUs are several times cheaper than decent GPUs.
Despite that, PS4/X1 CPUs don't have to directly feed GPUs. In a PC the CPU have to grab data from RAM and feed the GPU so it can copy it to its memory. PS4 (I will use it as an example because I'm more informed about its architecture, despite the X1 being similar) simply has every info on an unified pool so both the CPU and GPU can use it, with two memory buses, one for the GPU with a higher bandwidth and one that both can use with lower bandwidth. So the CPU can't become a bottleneck when feeding the GPU simply because it won't need to feed it. The GPU can go there and use what it wants.
The last time I built a PC was at the end of 2013 since I bought my motherboard, new tower and new RAM and just added my old CPU and GPU (this one not that old, got it in the beginning of 2013 with a new PSU) and I'm gaming on it, of course. And about AMD, I'm a AMD fanboy. I love AMD CPUs and when I replace my Phenom I will simply grab whatever high-end CPU AMD (it's way better to buy a high-end AMD one than a mid-end since I will be able to keep it for years without upgrading). What I don't like is theirs graphics drivers. Just looking at recent examples, Watch Dogs and Wolfestein had several issues with AMD GPUs and they aren't the first games to have it. Another good example is when looking at multi-OS benchmarks: while NVidia presents regular performance between Win/Linux/Mac, AMD simply floats like crazy. That's because the Nvidia driver simply shares 80% of the code between platforms. And that shows that it's a more mature code that works better. Despite that, in general Nvidia is the one pushing new techs: ray tracing, CUDA, mobile GPUs. When AMD ups their game here, I will gladly join their boat. Before that, it will be AMD CPU + NVidia GPU for me.
