Tomb Raider is one of 2013's biggest hits, in my opinion. It takes powerful graphics hardware to handle the Ultimate quality settings, which enable realistic TressFX hair.
We already know the Radeon HD 7970 has what it takes to deliver playable frame rates at that Ultimate preset, and we'll include the graphics-heavy “Chasm Monastery” level you typically see on Tom’s Hardware. But we're putting far more weight on the CPU-intensive outdoor “Mountain Village” level. Used together, these two benchmarks provide a worst-case look at the game’s CPU and GPU requirements.


Normal hair effects are used with the High quality preset. That flat area in the middle of our line graphs, where all the processors appear at the same level, is the cinematic sequence. The Athlon II X4 640 trails early on, but breezes through this part of the game, delivering 100+ frames per second.


As expected, frame rates plummet once we step outdoors and overlook “Mountain Village”. A lack of L3 cache appears to be the Athlon II X4 640’s weakness yet again, though it remains playable, briefly dipping below 30 FPS.


Overclocking yields small, insignificant gains, mainly because this test is almost exclusively GPU-bound. TressFX hair enabled by the Ultimate quality preset completely changes the flat cinematic portion of our run, and the mighty Radeon HD 7970 drops to 30 FPS, no matter which host processor backs it. Once the camera zooms off of Lara, we see a huge frame rate spike before control is shifted back to the user. Similar cinematic sequences are unavoidable, and a big part of the game.


Without a doubt, it takes powerful graphics hardware to drive the Ultimate detail preset smoothly. But parts of this game smack the processor around, also. In this test, the Athlon II X4 640 fails, making it difficult to control Lara’s maneuvers. In fact, the lack of consistency caused me to scrap a couple of benchmark runs after misjudging my zip-line approach and blindly leaping straight off the cliff. Of our test samples, only the two FX-series chips remain above 30 frames per second through our 45-second run.
- Targeting Budget-Minded Enthusiasts With AMD CPUs
- Platforms And Overclocking
- Test System Configuration And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Audio And Video
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Productivity
- Results: Compression
- Results: Borderlands 2
- Results: Crysis 3
- Results: F1 2012
- Results: Far Cry 3
- Results: Hitman: Absolution
- Results: StarCraft II: Heart Of The Swarm
- Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
- Results: Tomb Raider
- Power Consumption
- Performance Summary
- Wrapping Things Up: AMD Vs. Intel In Gaming
- Wrapping Things Up: AMD Vs. Intel In Applications And Power
- AMD: Loving More Cores And Unlocked Multipliers
K10 has so much more potential...
I always wanted to see how it would compare to newer models, and even intel counterparts. Thank you for this. I loved reading the article. Keep comparisons like this coming.
The main thing I hate about FX CPU's in the IPC. companies like intel have steadily increased the IPC of their CPU's while with AMD, going from Phenom II to the latest FX, they significantly reduced the IPC of their CPU's, and furthermore the resource sharing of the cores (by going with core modules instead of true cores). if similar resources are stressed, performance suffers as shown in the link below
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/138394-amds-fx-8350-analyzed-does-piledriver-deliver-where-bulldozer-fell-short/2
AMD would have done better by improving upon the phenom II and making an 8 core version.
I currently use a Phenom II x6 1075t overclocked to 3.9GHz
in cinebench 11.5 I get 7.01 points Which is still acceptable even by todays standards.
Northbridge is at 2.6GHz and hyper transport is at 2.08GHz
The highest I can push the CPU is about 4.4GHz but those speeds require around 1.575 volts, meaning I cant load the CPU to 100% for very long unless I take more drastic measures of connecting a vacuum hose from the case air intake to the air output of an air conditioner (to siphon off some of the cold air)
If you want to see just how bad the fx is compared to phenom II, clock some phenom II's and some FX's at the same clock speed, then do a range of benchmarks.
if Only AMD optimized there K10 arch ..., 8 core k10 will be much better ...
Are you serious, K10 have evolved for years and reached its wall, we talking about semprons --> athlons ---> Phenoms 1 ---> Phenoms 2 ---> AMD FM1 APU`s
And The Phenom 965 using 45nm as seen in the above chart uses 180Watts on load and upwards ...
So wake up people, if there was any untapped resources in k10 AMD would have popped them.
Also an index of cinebench single threaded performanc results from my research is :
Sandy Bridge/ivy/and haswell (no real innovation since SB, and those 10% CPU improvements, only adds 0.0x) :
i3 = ~1.3x Point
i5 = ~1.5x point
i7 = ~1,8x point
AMD :
AMD Athlon a8-3850 k10 CPU 0.8 Point
AMD Phenom x6 1100T (BEST AMD K10 CPU) 1.08
Richland A10-6800K ~1.11 point.
All above results all from my research and wether you want to simply belive or better go research yourself is your choice, but AMD have problem in Single threaded perfomance, and the way they hided back day was giving more cores, like the Phenom x6 in CInebench Multi threaded it scores ~6.0 points even the lowert 1050T scores 5.9 point, and all intel i5 CPU does not go up than 5 points.
but adding real 6 cores is trouble and problematic and too much power and resource hungry for BULK designs using BULk materical, remeber those x6 can reach 200W and upwardes, and more there costly and there prices does not budge.
Since Bulldozer first design, there have been many fixes and improvements, and Pilediver is only the first step forward, next step is steam roller, with each step steadily enhancements are being made, not can be much said about k10 that after 3-4 steps forward it froze.
I have been waiting for this test since I first heard mention of it.
Fantastic work! am always harvesting older chips to cobble together some frankenstein machines - or even just buying newer parts to do the best possible super budget machines for friends - so this is a godsend. Thanks for the wide selection of games too - some reviews just do a handful which doesn't give a broad enough picture. Icing on the cake is the comparison to the intel chips, including that 8400. Even the global (fix the spelling on the chart) wattage is v interesting. Very nice.
Intel is offering a good balance between multi threading and single threading performance by having CPU's that can give more than 2 points per core in applications such as cinebench.
Clock for clock, the phenom II is significantly faster than the FX series.
If they cannot put 8 true cores on a single CPU, then they need to work on releasing a quad core with an IPC that rivals the intel CPU's.
Lower IPC is a step in the wrong direction, FX is the wrong choice.
(minor quibbles...) For completeness, it would have been nice to see the FX-8350 lining up. And perhaps include the 3570k in the individual results as a benchmark, for context (Though I realise this was an AMD roundup, of course).