i7-3930K performance and gamepraise :)
weezl
Join Date: 2008-07-04 Member: 64557Members, Reinforced - Shadow
Just got my new computer parts on monday and was finished building/installing tuesday.
First game I tried was NS2! - WOW! - what a difference!
My fps has somewhere between doubled and tripled, compared to the previous rig.
For the first time I can actually enjoy the game at a smooth framerate. And what a game it IS! It actually feels very polished even at this stage! The environments and graphics (and lighting) look spectacular! All the tiny tidbits like icons for weapons on the ground, use key indication, stuff on marine HUD, etc, really give me a nice and fresh whole impression of the game. Not to mention all the new effects like nades, fire+smoke, ARC, etc.
All I can say to my fellow NS2 players is, just wait until you can play it smoothly - if you don't love NS2 yet, you most certainly will then!
UWE, keep up the amazing work! You are definitely on the right path...
As for more technical stuff...
Previous rig:
intel c2d e6850 OC@3.6
gtx480
4GB RAM
Played build 188 short, and fired up 189 quick just to check it out. Didn't play cos I had about 30fps which dropped to more like 10-20 in combat.
New rig:
intel i7-3930k
gtx480
16GB RAM
I now get pretty stable fps all the time with a minimum of 40 at the most demanding moments.
However, there's still some short freezes or single stutters from time to time.
Network performance still needs work, not as much for marines, but definitely for aliens, as I'm biting air mostly as skulk, when in NS1 80%+ would have been hits (now it's like 30%).
Often nade explosion animation don't play and sometimes not the sound either, which makes one think the nade glitch-disappeared, but dmg seems to still be dealt.
First game I tried was NS2! - WOW! - what a difference!
My fps has somewhere between doubled and tripled, compared to the previous rig.
For the first time I can actually enjoy the game at a smooth framerate. And what a game it IS! It actually feels very polished even at this stage! The environments and graphics (and lighting) look spectacular! All the tiny tidbits like icons for weapons on the ground, use key indication, stuff on marine HUD, etc, really give me a nice and fresh whole impression of the game. Not to mention all the new effects like nades, fire+smoke, ARC, etc.
All I can say to my fellow NS2 players is, just wait until you can play it smoothly - if you don't love NS2 yet, you most certainly will then!
UWE, keep up the amazing work! You are definitely on the right path...
As for more technical stuff...
Previous rig:
intel c2d e6850 OC@3.6
gtx480
4GB RAM
Played build 188 short, and fired up 189 quick just to check it out. Didn't play cos I had about 30fps which dropped to more like 10-20 in combat.
New rig:
intel i7-3930k
gtx480
16GB RAM
I now get pretty stable fps all the time with a minimum of 40 at the most demanding moments.
However, there's still some short freezes or single stutters from time to time.
Network performance still needs work, not as much for marines, but definitely for aliens, as I'm biting air mostly as skulk, when in NS1 80%+ would have been hits (now it's like 30%).
Often nade explosion animation don't play and sometimes not the sound either, which makes one think the nade glitch-disappeared, but dmg seems to still be dealt.
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Went from a E6750@3.2 to a 2500k myself. Same kind of performance boost when I did
There shouldn't be much gaming gain from the Sandy bridge stuff to the Sandy-E bridge ones though, but you do get extra work performance for the extra money.
Putting my 2500k to shame :P
(total waste of money if your main goal is gaming, wont be barely any performance increase in this area compared to the i5,i7 1155socket cpus)
My reasons:
1. Dual/triple -core is not enough for the most demanding games, quadcore is just enough right now - I wanted something future-proof.
2. I know very well how little gaming difference there is between i5-2500k and i7-3930k, but luckily I didn't have a supertight budget to limit me.
3. I use my computer to more things besides gaming, I also do computation on it related to what I study. Hence powerful CPU + gtx480 + 16GB RAM.
4. In the future I'm planning to get multiple graphics cards, most likely gtx680:s, which I'll need CPU horsepower for.
5. Related to #1, I upgrade very seldom so again, I want something that lasts (this can also be OC'd like crazy).
First "real" computer was a Northwood P4 3.2GHz in fall of 2003.
Second was the Conroe e6850 in fall of 2007.
Now the third SNB-E 3930k in winter 2011, so it goes about 4 years between the purchases.
(oh, and i couldn't bear to wait ANOTHER year for IVB-E!)
But yeah, if the computer was purely for gaming, and I had even 20% less budget I'd ofc go for 2500k with 8GB RAM.
It does seem to give an improvement over the 2600k with encoding/other intensive, non-gaming tasks (see <a href="http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/4435/intel_core_i7_3930k_lga_2011_cpu_review/index6.html" target="_blank">here</a>). Though, its not big enough to justify the much higher cost for budget gamers.
Same here can't wait for that stuff to hit the market!
1. Dual/triple -core is not enough for the most demanding games, quadcore is just enough right now - I wanted something future-proof.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The majority of new games run on 1/2 cores. Anything extra is a bit of a waste, just as a fyi on your future proofing idea for games.
Although as you said, you do use those extra cores for other stuff which is handy or you really would have blown a wad of dosh!
That and... 16Gb of RAM is so... Yesterday!
That's awesome for any online community. I wish there was somewhere online for stuff like that.
I am shocked at the alien combat experience compared to NS1. There's little to no movement skill except for the lerk, a class on which it is lost because of the reversal back to ranged attacks. It's become the opposite of the fun, fluid combat that actually made me want to play NS1 aliens.
Graphically, the game is beautiful for a multiplayer FPS. Strategically, it's too early to tell really but it seems decent enough. Marines are fun as they always have been; the LMG and the Shotgun are what make them worth playing and the prominent role they still have is good. Aliens, though, are painful and boring. The defining characteristics of each of the alien classes feels gutted and hollow.
It feels like the move back to all these cool/fun ideas from various archaic version of NS1 (cropduster spores, ranged spikes as main weapon, fade instablink, alien lifefeorms attached to hive number and more [many of which have been implemented during the beta and changed back to how they were in NS1 v3.0]) and too much of a slant towards rock paper scissors RTS style strategy are the cause.
Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong!
There are applications that can profit from that much RAM, like video editing, 3D modeling, compiling huge programs, etc.
It can also be useful to "normal" people:
RAM disk!
It's like an SSD, but even faster. The data is lost when you shutdown your PC, though. There could be some way around that with uninterruptible PSUs and maybe a special motherboard but I don't know exactly.
You can put some stuff on it and back it up on your HDD again before shutdown. Everything you do with it will be incredibly fast (10-30GB/s, nanoseconds of latency). You can put your swap file on it, for example, so it won't be much slower than regular RAM (some programs still need a swap file to work because they specifically address it, so it can crash them if you disable it).
Try putting the data of a game completely onto a RAM disk and use symbolic links to make it work right. You could also use proprietary software to do some automatic cashing for you (like FancyCache). Intel has the same concept in its Z68 chipset, but applied to small SSDs being a cache for the slow regular HDDs. The RAM caching software does not seem to be very mature, though, since I've seen a lot of repots that it is even slower than caching with a SSD, but that may be related to the relatively small size of the cache.
I will probably get myself 16GB at the current prices and try that out.
Even 32Gb is not enough to fully allocate 6 cores / 12 threads in Adobe After Effects :( Haha! Ahh, I bet this time next year we will all be saying 'Bah - 64Gb of RAM? Miniscule.' I remember getting excited about having 128mb... There must be some older blokes around who can share their excitement at even less!
My favorite applications were paint, minesweeper, parrot.exe that came with a soundblaster card (yelling at that damn copycat parrot was a lot of fun), and a demo disk called WizPak Wizardware (pretty sure) that had tons of shareware games (anyone remember the Moraff games?). Commander Keen, Duke Nukem, Shooting Gallery, Hugo's House of Horrors....whew. Played a lot of X-Wing, Wolf3d, Sam'n'Max, Fate of Atlantis, and DOTT in later years...mmm. Good times for gaming - glad I was that age then.
Before I fully understood about disk partitions, I tried installing Carmageddon on a later computer...only to run out of disk space (the game was less than 300mb, I'm sure)...man, I hated the days where you had to delete games just to play something else.
At least I didn't have to do punch card programming in college (you have no idea how often I hear that from those older than me)
Running an i5 860 now with a AMD5850, seems to be holding out for anything thats been recently released. I probably won't be looking at new hardware for at least a couple years. So little time and so many games to play these days, too.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/qNlqF.gif" border="0" class="linked-image" />
64KB of ram was all I ever needed :)
<i>EDIT: I really want to say it was an Imagic game because of the cartridge design/pattern. It may have been Demon Attack, not sure. Hard to say since striping patterns like that were a popular graphic design at the time, haha...those red/orange colors too... Seems similar! I'll have to look for it this Christmas holiday.</i>
I should try some C64 emulation. I never have yet. I love a lot of the older and simple arcadey games like Berzerk, Asteroids, Tempest, and Sinistar.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/S2Vsb.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
Literacy:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/bEB3M.jpg" border="0" class="linked-image" />
and being kick-ass:
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/cnrSg.png" border="0" class="linked-image" />
DUDE, THATS GORLLIA(S)! That game was on the Wizardware VGA demo disk I had. Chucking bananas was never so much fun...and of course who wouldn't recognize the last screen! Sternhart was indeed a wind-bag. I did play some learning games, but not that one there in the middle, haha -- an Apogee game, too!
I am shocked at the alien combat experience compared to NS1. There's little to no movement skill except for the lerk, a class on which it is lost because of the reversal back to ranged attacks. It's become the opposite of the fun, fluid combat that actually made me want to play NS1 aliens.
Graphically, the game is beautiful for a multiplayer FPS. Strategically, it's too early to tell really but it seems decent enough. Marines are fun as they always have been; the LMG and the Shotgun are what make them worth playing and the prominent role they still have is good. Aliens, though, are painful and boring. The defining characteristics of each of the alien classes feels gutted and hollow.
It feels like the move back to all these cool/fun ideas from various archaic version of NS1 (cropduster spores, ranged spikes as main weapon, fade instablink, alien lifefeorms attached to hive number and more [many of which have been implemented during the beta and changed back to how they were in NS1 v3.0]) and too much of a slant towards rock paper scissors RTS style strategy are the cause.
Please, someone correct me if I'm wrong!<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Just felt that this post should be repeated.
Worth <u>thinking</u> about.
Intel i5-2500k 3.30GHz
8 GB of Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX460
Get around 130 on high end to 40 on low end. Only problem is the clan mates haven't upgraded their comps yet, so I have been playing other games. For the Average Box the game is unplayable.
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/qNlqF.gif" border="0" class="linked-image" />
64KB of ram was all I ever needed :)<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
That's what I was thinking :)
Dude, are you kidding me? These guys are over two years into development and the engine isn't even multithreaded yet?
Unbelievable. I have a 3.4GHz quad core Phenom and a 2GB 6970. The fact that Battlefield 3 runs better than this game is unforgivable.
Unbelievable. I have a 3.4GHz quad core Phenom and a 2GB 6970. The fact that Battlefield 3 runs better than this game is unforgivable.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yeah man, it's unforgivable they are working on the engine and game with only about 6 people, they should hire like the same amount of people that are developing BF3! <img src="http://members.home.nl/m.borgman/ns-forum/smileys/rolleyes.gif" border="0" class="linked-image" />
-- EA=Huge Team+Deep Pockets -> BF3, development time ~3.5 years for BF3, yeah seems about right, <a href="http://www.computerandvideogames.com/289198/battlefield-3-will-be-game-of-the-year-says-ea/" target="_blank">oh wait</a>...