Q:
Hey there,
So recently I saw a video on MattVisual’s YouTube channel in regards to what he had to do increase FPS in area’s such as WvW and even LA. The video can be found here for those who want to watch it: http://youtu.be/a7BcHtILqQE
He details a processor upgrade as being the main thing that helped him. The processor he was originally using was an AMD FX 8120 3.16 GHZ; he changed to an Intel I7 4770 3.5 GHZ.
AMD and Intel fan boys can wave there independent flags all day, there is something to be said by the more than 100% increase in FPS in Lion’s Arch, going from 25-40 FPS up to 70-90 FPS.
The hardware change was not a 100%+ upgrade when you look at the specs, but you can not deny the vast improvement is quite astounding, but puzzling at the same time. Now one could argue how many cores are utilized by GW2, the tech behind the architecture of the processors, etc, etc.
My question to the A-Net Dev’s is whether or not one should immediately factor in Intel vs. AMD when building a rig. I have a rig that I custom built back in February, with GW2 being in mind when I built it. While the upgrade was a vast improvement with what I was working with initially, I definitely see performance issues that trouble me. I have a fairly current generation AMD processor and it makes me want to rage when I am in WvW and can’t get a skill to go off. I can press it via mouse, via keyboard, doesn’t matter; it still just acts like nothing was done after I see the skill button graphic recognize it was pressed.
Should people completely avoid AMD processors when it comes to building a rig for GW2? Is the game truly not optimized enough to leverage the AMD processor tech and bottle necking your users? If it is bottle necking, is there any plans in the near future to optimize?
People are spending $100’s to $1000+ on building rigs just for GW2 and I feel this is a topic that the Dev’s should discuss before people feel they are not getting their money’s worth.
I’m going to chime in where I’m not wanted for a moment.
It’s not just a problem with GW2. Intel has been beating AMD in CPU dependent gaming since the Core 2 came out. AMD almost catches up only to see Intel release the next iteration of CPU and pushing the lead out again.
Here is an example of what I’m getting at. When a game is GPU capped, it doesn’t really matter which brand are using. You can see this here showing Metro 2033 performance, a game that’s known to be GPU limited (even more so at 2560×1440). But when a game isn’t GPU bound as seen here showing Civ 5 performance, Intel is the clear favorite.
Just wanted to make it clear it’s not just a Guild Wars 2 thing.
(edited by Behellagh.1468)
I’m going to chime in where I’m not wanted for a moment.
It’s not just a problem with GW2. Intel has been beating AMD in CPU dependent gaming since the Core 2 came out. AMD almost catches up only to see Intel release the next iteration of CPU and pushing the lead out again.
Here is an example of what I’m getting at. When a game is GPU capped, it doesn’t really matter which brand are using. You can see this here showing Metro 2033 performance, a game that’s known to be GPU limited (even more so at 2560×1440). But when a game isn’t GPU bound as seen here showing Civ 5 performance, Intel is the clear favorite.
Just wanted to make it clear it’s not just a Guild Wars 2 thing.
More power to the right to post. While I request an A-Net Dev, obviously personal experience and knowledge plays a role. Customer reviews are nothing but opinion and people look at those in choices they make in the world of tech. That being said, you make very valid points on the tech. My hope of this thread is that A-Net can expand on the very topics you bring up from an internal knowledge that the casual gamer would not have. Is the performance something that they have the power to increase on a software capability level? Is it something that PC builders should take into account for the A-Net product? The topic is designed to help those who’s direct concern is performance for GW2 and what to plan on for those who currently have a recent build finished and those who are planning a build in the upcoming future.
It’s not Anet’s fault in the slightest. AMD just can’t keep with Intel core for core atm, so when you use an AMD CPU in this game you’re hugely kitten.
It basically comes down to the fact that GW2 can’t take advantage of enough of the cores of the AMD CPUs to get performance on par with Intel stuff. For example:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/677?vs=697
In the single threaded benchmarks, Intel’s lowest end i series CPU outperforms AMD’s highest offering. In the multithreaded benches, it’s the opposite. iirc GW2 only uses 2 cores, so AMD’s weaker performance per core holds them back massively.
Also, unlike Intel, AMD doesn’t show linear gains from overclocking, so even if you can get to 5 GHz you’re not getting the same boost as an equally overclocked Intel CPU would.
It is and isnt ANETs fault.
It isnt their fault that Intel CPUs excel in single thread performance far better and are generally a generation or two ahead of AMDs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-5.html
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
However it is their fault for not optimizing the engine to better utilize multiple cores or that they very much disregarded performance as a factor while making this game.
Even with a 4770 or 4670 (offering the same performance for GW2) WvW will still tank your frames.
Only with a very limited budget can you consider buying an AMD CPU and even then speaking strictly for GW2 you d probably be better off with a dual core i3.
It’s not Anet’s fault in the slightest. AMD just can’t keep with Intel core for core atm, so when you use an AMD CPU in this game you’re hugely kitten.
It basically comes down to the fact that GW2 can’t take advantage of enough of the cores of the AMD CPUs to get performance on par with Intel stuff. For example:
http://anandtech.com/bench/product/677?vs=697
In the single threaded benchmarks, Intel’s lowest end i series CPU outperforms AMD’s highest offering. In the multithreaded benches, it’s the opposite. iirc GW2 only uses 2 cores, so AMD’s weaker performance per core holds them back massively.
Also, unlike Intel, AMD doesn’t show linear gains from overclocking, so even if you can get to 5 GHz you’re not getting the same boost as an equally overclocked Intel CPU would.
Equal in percentage overclock or equal in clock speed. Asking because if you are talking clockspeed then you are just resurrecting the “megahertz myth” that different CPUs can do the same amount of work in the same number of cycles and that’s never been true.
I’m going to get slightly technical here but I’ll try to simplify it if I can. Since the original Pentium, nearly all desktop CPUs are superscalar, meaning they can execute more than one instruction at a time. It can do this because there is duplicate internal functionality in the CPU. Multiple integer math units for instance. The CPU looks at the code it’s about to execute and determines which instructions could be executed at the same time without altering the purpose of the code. So for example if you have A+B=C and D*E=F, those can be done at the same time while A+B=C, C*D=F can’t be.
Now over the years since the Pentium, CPU designs have become even more superscalar. Now the problem is the more duplicate functionality you add to the core, the less likely that they will be used to their fullest. Intel’s “fix” for this is hyperthreading. By running two different threads at the same time, they can increase how often the duplicate functionality is used since the two threads shouldn’t be dependent on each other’s code at all.
Let me step back a moment and talk about multitasking for a moment. Multitasking at it’s simplest is allowing two programs/threads run on the same core while maintaining the illusion that they are running at the same time. They aren’t, they are simply time sharing the same core, one runs for say a millisecond, then the other one and then back to the first one, etc. If each of the two threads take 5 seconds to run alone, when multitasking they will both take 10 seconds, the sum of their run times.
Now hyperthreading (HT) can affect this. First the two threads are no longer time sharing the same core by alternating who’s running, they are running at the same time. They both think they have 100% of the core to themselves but because the core can use it’s superscalar nature more efficiently with two threads than just one, they now each run a little faster than if they were alternating so instead of taking 5 seconds each to run, they now take 4.9 seconds each or 9.8 seconds in total instead of 10 seconds.
This is an important point when dealing with Intel CPUs. One thread running takes 5 seconds, two threads running without HT 10 seconds, but two threads with HT take 9.8 seconds. Next post is about AMD FX CPUs.
(edited by Behellagh.1468)
Now AMD’s FX CPU takes a slightly different approach. Their goal is try and get the same performance as hyperthreading but using two simpler, less superscaled cores. Thus the “module” was born.
An AMD “module” consists of two smaller cores that use some shared front and back end portions of a normal core, to save on space. So lets start from the goal, two threads running on one module, that’s two cores, taking 9.8 seconds to run, the same time two threads take on an HT Intel core. But what happens when you only need to run one thread? Due to performance loss when running both cores at the same time within a module (sharing the front and back end has a penalty), a single thread runs about 25% faster so one thread only takes 7.85 seconds.
So on an AMD FX, one thread takes 7.85 seconds to run, two threads but on a single core 15.7 seconds and two threads running on both cores in the module 9.8 seconds. This means Intel runs one thread or two threads with traditional multitasking about 50% faster and only when using HT on the Intel does AMD catches up. That’s why the 2 module/4 core FX-4xxx targets the i3 dual core with HT and the 4 module/8 core FX-8xxx targets the i7 quad core with HT.
So while we get the FX-8350 neck and neck on Cinebench multithreaded with an i7-2600K (like I said in my first post, AMD is running a step or two behind), if you aren’t fully engaging both CPUs with 8 threads, then Intel takes the lead.
I forgot to note that single core performance between the FX and the older K10 Athlon II/Phenom II CPUs is pretty much the same. Where AMD gained on Intel is when all cores are busy.
So why does all this matter? All this superscalar, multithreaded, hyperthreaded, “module” stuff. Because in any program there is always one thread that has more work to do than the others. And obviously it can only run as fast as a single core will allow it to. So that’s where single core performance comes in. In many games this is the renderer, the code that takes the current game state and the direction you are looking in and converts it into DirectX 3D instructions that the graphics driver then converts into hardware commands for the video card you have in your rig. At some point the renderer has to wait on the graphics driver to get done (which is waiting on the video card to give it the go ahead on excepting more data and instructions) so it’s really the combination of the renderer and the graphics driver that can’t exceed the performance of a single core.
While Dx11 makes it a lot easier to break the renderer into multiple threads itself, to take advantage of more cores, it’s very difficult to do with Dx9 and 10 as they weren’t designed for it.
So this is how we end up with single core performance mattering and why AMD is currently at a major disadvantage.
TL;DR version
While AMD’s FX can keep up with a fully thread loaded i3 or i7 when number of Intel cores equals AMD FX modules, Intel easily pulls away when fewer and fewer threads are running at the same time. And since most games aren’t running lots of equally time consuming threads at the same time, performance boils down to the time it takes to run the slowest thread on a single core and in that case Intel wins.
I hope that is helpful and not to confusing.
(edited by Behellagh.1468)
Intel is king right now on thread performance, AMD has not kept up with that going the side of more threads, which is fine for multitasking or highly threaded programs/games, and the new AMD chips do very well vs its Intel counter part in these areas, but when you run into games or programs that are not made to make use of all threads, you have problems, and that’s it here. Could/should Anet made GW2 make better use of more threads in this day and age? Yes. But not really a fault of Anet for AMD vs Intel, AMD made a choice in direction which has affected it in the gamer side of things, however AMD has even stated they don’t much care about it, as the PC gaming market is very small compared to sales to OEMs, which is where the money is and AMD needs income, so the choice they made was a smart one. So AMD is not, nor is it trying to keep up with Intel on the highend, they are shooting for cheap high thread count CPU’s, and they are hitting that market very well.
As for the pushing buttons and seeing the icon animate, that is not a performance or FPS problem, that’s a server lag problem, one that has gotten very bad in prime time in WvW, and Anet has done nothing to fix it. I have this problem and can show you screens with it happening while keeping a stable 70FPS+.
Equal in percentage overclock or equal in clock speed. Asking because if you are talking clockspeed then you are just resurrecting the “megahertz myth” that different CPUs can do the same amount of work in the same number of cycles and that’s never been true.
I meant that if you take a 4670k and overclock it by 10%, you’ll see a gain of 10% performance in CPU limited situations. However, if you overclock an FX-8350 by 10%, you won’t see a 10% gain in CPU limited situations, it’ll be somewhere less.
Intel is king right now on thread performance, AMD has not kept up with that going the side of more threads, which is fine for multitasking or highly threaded programs/games, and the new AMD chips do very well vs its Intel counter part in these areas, but when you run into games or programs that are not made to make use of all threads, you have problems, and that’s it here. Could/should Anet made GW2 make better use of more threads in this day and age? Yes. But not really a fault of Anet for AMD vs Intel, AMD made a choice in direction which has affected it in the gamer side of things, however AMD has even stated they don’t much care about it, as the PC gaming market is very small compared to sales to OEMs, which is where the money is and AMD needs income, so the choice they made was a smart one. So AMD is not, nor is it trying to keep up with Intel on the highend, they are shooting for cheap high thread count CPU’s, and they are hitting that market very well.
Exactly. In general use, AMD takes the cake, especially on a budget. Games are just where they really fall behind.
Also, long time no see. Gale of Flyff here- I still remember having a couple decent computer related discussions with you.
Equal in percentage overclock or equal in clock speed. Asking because if you are talking clockspeed then you are just resurrecting the “megahertz myth” that different CPUs can do the same amount of work in the same number of cycles and that’s never been true.
I meant that if you take a 4670k and overclock it by 10%, you’ll see a gain of 10% performance in CPU limited situations. However, if you overclock an FX-8350 by 10%, you won’t see a 10% gain in CPU limited situations, it’ll be somewhere less.
Intel is king right now on thread performance, AMD has not kept up with that going the side of more threads, which is fine for multitasking or highly threaded programs/games, and the new AMD chips do very well vs its Intel counter part in these areas, but when you run into games or programs that are not made to make use of all threads, you have problems, and that’s it here. Could/should Anet made GW2 make better use of more threads in this day and age? Yes. But not really a fault of Anet for AMD vs Intel, AMD made a choice in direction which has affected it in the gamer side of things, however AMD has even stated they don’t much care about it, as the PC gaming market is very small compared to sales to OEMs, which is where the money is and AMD needs income, so the choice they made was a smart one. So AMD is not, nor is it trying to keep up with Intel on the highend, they are shooting for cheap high thread count CPU’s, and they are hitting that market very well.
Exactly. In general use, AMD takes the cake, especially on a budget. Games are just where they really fall behind.
Also, long time no see. Gale of Flyff here- I still remember having a couple decent computer related discussions with you.
Gale?? WTF. What server are you on? You still talk with Tayler? If so she never told me you played GW2, I am on CD.
The sad part about AMD vs Intel, is if devs today made games more parallel, the few games out there that can make use of 8-12 threads do great on AMD chips, right up there with it’s Intel counter part. And the more down the road we get, the more we see of this, I think AMD’s plan will pay off in the next few years when just about everything is being written with multithreaded in mind, but untill we reach that point AMD is going to lag behind, not because it can’t keep up, but because games/programs don’t make use of the power it does have.
Intel has been beating AMD in CPU dependent gaming since the Core 2 came out.
Phenom II.
Each company has their ups and downs. I’m an owner of an all AMD machine, but I didn’t build it for Guild Wars 2 specifically. If I were however to build a computer exclusively for Guild Wars 2, I’d use an i5 or an i7. Most likely an i7. It doesn’t matter on the graphics in my opinion. Though I favor Radeon.
Intel has been beating AMD in CPU dependent gaming since the Core 2 came out.
Phenom II.
Hahahaha! That’s a good one.
Phenom II came out in Jan 2009. Intel was already released the first generation if i7s and 2nd gen Core 2s were in their prime. Let’s see what was available then.
x4 940 Vs i7-965
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/80?vs=45
That’s OK, let’s compare it to the Core 2 series
x4 940 Vs Q9650
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/80?vs=49
I’m not trying to beat up AMD here. They ate Intel’s lunch for years as Intel hung onto the Pentium 4/D line but were caught napping when the Core 2 came out. They caught up with the 1st gen Core 2 performance with the Athlon II/Phenom II but the 2nd gen Core 2 was already out along with the 1st gen i3/i5/i7, which are now on their 4th generation. AMD now has the 2nd gen FX which can compete in multithreaded benchmarks with 2nd and 3rd gen i3/i7s, sometimes.
I’m simply being a realist. AMD is a step or two behind Intel in performance. What AMD has going for it is price. Also the FX-4300/4350 matches up well with the i3-3220/3240 in price and performance. It’s just top end is out of reach.
(edited by Behellagh.1468)
Well, from what I’ve heard, Phenom II kinda kicked Core 2 around and that the release of the i3, i5, and i7 was Intel’s response and so far AMD has not been able to beat it.
Well, from what I’ve heard, Phenom II kinda kicked Core 2 around and that the release of the i3, i5, and i7 was Intel’s response and so far AMD has not been able to beat it.
Not at all, the gaming side of things the core2 was the kitten, PII was what? Late 2009? And that was dual cores, Intel already had the Q6600 on the market long before then, probably one of the longest lived CPU’s on the gaming side of things in a while, by the time the PII quads hit Intel had the Q9xxx line out, which where beasts and OCed so easy, had more instructionsets, used less power etc etc. AMD has been draging behind in the gaming area for a while now unless we are talking casual gaming, bang for buck allot of the AMD systems will run those kind of games just fine.
Ah. well then now I know then lol.
AMD’s still got good things though even if they’re not the best. I’m pretty satisifed
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