Upgraded to 290x Crossfire... framerates STILL garbage?!

My AMD CPU based computer thanks you Varrak.

Thanks so much for this. That totally allows me to get my nerd on.
Please feel free to let us glimps at stuff like this whenever you want.

Given Mantle was mentioned, I'd be interested to hear what your stance towards this is. Ie. something you keep an eye out for, waiting for the results others will produce with it or something you mostly discarded for now, given that PA will not be anywhere near as GPU effects heavy as the latest generation of shooters?

Keep up the good work, love you guys!

Intel vs AMD - Intel is king of single or limited number thread performance. Most games of the last few years may use 2 or 3 threads, but most of the performance is bottlenecked on only one of those. For these games a mobile Core i3 can often beat out some of the fastest AMD cpus.

More recently games have been pushing to more efficiently use multithreading. For programs that properly use mutlithreading each CPU can share the load more evenly. Recent AMD cpus can frequently beat out Intel cpus when heavy multithreading is involved.

The reason for this is the popular Core i5 and Core i3 cpus are limited to 4 threads on either 4 or 2 cores. Core i7s have 8 or 12 threads on 4 or 6 cores.

The AMD FX cpus and APUs from the last two years are somewhat peculiar in their design, but the result is they are capable of doing some types of multithreading faster than Intel Core cpus, and the 4 core cpus all capable of 8 threads. It's important to note that what AMD refers to as a "core" for these cpus isn't the same as Intel's "core", which they call "modules". The reality is an AMD cpu marketed as having 8 cores is really a "4 module, 8 core" cpu which is much closer to the Intel's i7 "4 core, 8 thread" than AMD likes people to think about.

So from that the impression i'm getting the AMD 8 core is really a 4 core with the equivalent hyper-threading/turbo-boost threading...

You can't directly compare CPUs. AMD/Intel processors can be more efficient in one task and less efficient in other.

ahhh, yepp

So it still similar to what it was like back in the AMD athlon days.
One had advantages because it had a floating point math co-processor.
Other did integer math more efficient..
Can't remember which was which (im sure AMD had the Floating point Co-processor for 3d gaming.)

They're not equivalent.
Here's the two methods described as Santa's elves in assembly lines.

Intel:
There are two "to do" piles of toy kits delivered by two sleighs (threads) and a single line of elves ready to put one part on (a core). As batches of toy kits get dropped into the "to do" piles they're put on the assembly line and the elves get to work. Frequently one pile is empty waiting for the next shipment of kits, but the elves don't have as much down time because they can work on the pile that still has stuff.

AMD:
There is one "to do" pile of toy kits delivered by one sleigh (module) and two lines of elves who are only trained to hammer nails (integer cores). Shared between both lines is a line of elves that can help with more complex tasks like painting (FPU). The pile of toy kits is alternated between the two lines.

As long as only one toy kit needs the specialist elves at a time the AMD elves can get through a pile faster than the Intel elves, but they spend more time waiting for the next delivery. If the toys kits need more painting, the Intel elves end up faster because they spend less time waiting for work.

So it hasn't really changed much since i last brought an AMD cpu 9 year ago ..

edited--
well apart from the obvious advances in architecture and moving from single to multi-cored die's

The AMD FX series CPUs with this odd architecture were first released in 2011, not 9 years ago.

But don't 8-core AMD Bulldozer have 8 threads, not 4?
I always figured AMD treated them externally as separate cores, regardless of their interior operations.

No its 8 threads across 4 real cores and 4 virtual/hyper threaded cores..
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/363278-28-core

And

what i meant by not much has changed since i brought an amd 9 year ago was,
9 year ago AMD was geared toward gaming with the Floating Point math co-processor and specific architectures for gaming..
Now its still very similar, but as bgolus mentioned games are moving away from needing or relying on dedicated architectures and moving toward multi core usage instead..

To quote a poster from that very link:
"You chose the best answer as something that is wholistically incorrect at the very core, it is so sad that this kind of information gets passed around."

I've found my answer, in any case, here. The FX-8350 and FX-8320 have 8 cores and 8 threads.

It's not 8 independent cores, check this picture of FX-8350 (not 100% sure, but main idea is same):


So those "AMD cores" (with shared L2 cache) can't be compared to "Intel cores". And yeah internal architecture just too different.

They have four modules,each module has two cores ..
The two cores per module share some of the resources within the module(FPU and L2 cache)
Purists would say that they are not true cores because they share these resources.

Ninja'd by SXX

dementiurge is correct about my messing up tho,, they aren't virtual cores they are real but share resources, so only one core per module can be effectively run at full efficiency..
It is very much like bgolus's elves explanation..
I gotta admit there is a lot of confusing info out there in google land on this topic ..lol

There is possible tasks when AMD arhitecture might be more efficient than Intel Hyper-Threading. Though for many games per-core performance is more important and Intel obviously win here.

i mess that up too
It Was meant to say
they aren't virtual cores they are real but share resources, so only one core per module can be effectively run at full efficiency, unless the software is written to take advantage of the architecture,,

I don't think most people understood my analogy. I was simplifying a bit, but it should be fairly accurate.

FPUs have been around for a long time. The thing that made AMD cpus originally stand out was not that they had an FPU but rather they allotted more transistor space to floating point math than Pentiums of the era (which were being built for maximum Ghz for marketing reasons, not for performance). Ironically the newer AMD cpus have swung the other way, sacrificing floating point for raw integer performance. Intel on the other hand has continued to push both.