AMD FX-8350 Review: Does Piledriver Fix Bulldozer's Flaws?

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Last year, AMD launched its Bulldozer architecture to disappointed enthusiasts who were hoping to see the company rise to its former glory. Today, we get an FX processor based on the Piledriver update. Does it give power users something to celebrate?

Benchmark Results: Battlefield 3

Historically, we’ve seen AMD’s processors bottleneck the performance of certain games at low resolutions and mainstream quality settings. Using a GeForce GTX 680 at Battlefield 3’s Ultra quality preset, however, reveals no such limitation (even with anti-aliasing disabled completely).

Of course, this only applies to the single-player campaign, which tends to be GPU-heavy. The multi-player element of Battlefield 3 is more taxing on processor performance. But because it’s difficult to create a repeatable benchmark involving 63 other players, we’ll move on to another game notorious for its emphasis on CPU speed.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.