BEST CPU FOR GAMERS : April 2014

Author : Daeguen Lee

(Any action violating either copyright laws or CCL policy of the original source is strictly prohibited)

 

※ 이 글은 최신판이 아닙니다. 최신판인 2015년 4월호는 아래 링크에서 보실 수 있습니다.

- GAMER'S CHOICE : April 2015

 

 

 

Introduction

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So far, I've dealt with all "contemporaneous and properly-existing" CPUs in the market and measured their gaming performance. Reason why I did this is that, one should know at which level one's system can run 3D games smoothly without being suffered from CPU-bottleneck, but it's very hard to know because of the lack of information. For an individual, gathering SKUs from all line-up and testing them under several scenario are very difficult tasks. Well, I did that all. Here we start.

 

Criteria I used for determining whether a CPU is "contemporaneous" and "properly-existing" are as follow:

- Whether it is being replaced (by latter SKU, by the same price level) or not. For example, IVB/Haswell or Trinity/Richland.

- Whether it is having (or providing) compatibility to the (company's) latest platform. (2011, 1150, AM3+, FM2+...)

 

 

Test Setup & Methodology

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Test system I used is composed as follow:

 

 

For your information: R4E / C5F imply RAMPAGE IV EXTREME and CROSSHAIR V FORMULA respectively. Since K version of Haswell Refresh wouldn't be appear at the first release, I "assume" that 4790K and 4690K would have the same spec as 4790/4690 so as 4770K/4670K for their own non-K sisters. (That's why K letters are in bracket) For LGA2011 platform, there used 4 4GB DIMMs to enabling all quad channels while otherwise only two of them are used.

Note that for every game title, all graphics quality options in in-game control panel are set to the highest possible settings. For example, for Battlefield 4 I used an "Ultra" preset as well as "DX11+DDOF" for Bioshock : Infinite benchmark.

 

Let's get the theory part finished. Here's the result.

Every result is folded right under the title of each chapter. Click to see full context.

 

 

Result

(1) 3DMark 11

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(2) 3DMark 2013

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(3) Aliens vs Predator

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(4) Batman : Arkham City

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(5) Battlefield 4

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(6) Bioshock : Infinite

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(7) Crysis : Warhead

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(8) Crysis 3

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(9) DiRT : Showdown

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(10) Hitman : Absolution

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(11) Just Cause 2

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(12) Lost Planet 2

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(13) Metro 2033

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(14) Metro : Last Light

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(15) Sleeping Dogs

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(16) Sniper Elite V2

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(17) Tomb Raider

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Performance Summary

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In this article, summarization drives in two ways: one is just summing up all results (framerates of all games) thus make us enable to compare accumulated framerates each as an abstraction of performance. Another way is taking arithmetic average of relative performances of all games. In this case, all results (of a certain game/test) are to be normalized by the value Core i7 4960X obtained in that game/test. Because each game has its own characteristics, for example, A game is favor in AMD while B game shows the contrary, accumulated framerate doesn't nessesarily mean average relative performance. To be simple, both approaches may drive you to different conclusions. Note that I personally weigh the latter far more than the former.

 

Here's summaries for 1680 x 1050 resolution.

 

 

 

Since dual-core A-series APUs (A6 6400K and A4 6300) are incapable of running Crysis 3 and Sleeping Dogs, I excluded these two games for accumulation (Simply, if not, accumulated framerate of them would surely be defeated even by any of Kabini competitors. It doesn't make sense) and so as for obtaining average relative performance. Thus only A6 6400K and A4 6300 have denominator two less than others. This manner is also applied to below two scenarios - 1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600 resolutions.

 

Here's 1920 x 1080 summaries.

 

 

 

Here's the last - 2560 x 1600.

 

 

 

Hurray!!!! The whole graphs are over.

 

 

Conclusion

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Okay. Let's check what we've learn from this article out.

 

(Blahblah... I'll finish up the commentary asap.)

//

 

(아래 위젯은 티스토리의 크라우드펀딩 시스템인 '밀어주기' 위젯입니다. 100원부터 3000원까지의 범위 내에서 글쓴이에게 소액 기부가 가능합니다. 사견으로는 이러한 형태의 펀딩이야말로, 성공적으로 정착될 경우 이해관계자로부터 독립된 벤치마크가 지속가능해지는 원동력이 될 것이라 생각합니다. 제가 작성한 글이 후원할만한 가치가 있다고 여기신다면 밀어주기를 통한 후원을 부탁드립니다. 물론 글을 '가치있게' 쓰는 것은 오롯이 저의 몫이며, 설령 제 글이 '후원할 만큼 가치있게' 여겨지지는 못해 결과적으로 후원을 받지 못하더라도 그것이 독자 여러분의 잘못이 아니란 건 너무 당연해 굳이 언급할 필요도 없겠습니다. 저는 후원 여부와 관계없이 제 글을 읽어주시는 모든 독자분께 감사합니다.)