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Most parts of the country aren't expected to see any more snowfall until next winter, but the relationship between Nvidia and Intel couldn't be any more chilly. At odds with each other over Nehalem licensing, netbook platforms, and other tech related spats, the two sides seem all to happy to take digs at one another when the opportunity arises. For Nvidia, that means calling to question Intel's claim that its Core i7 processor can improve game performance by up to 80 percent.
"I have a copy of Intel’s latest deck that they share with press and customers, and on there they have a slide that is called The Intel Core i7 920 Processor, where they claim that gaming performance goes up by 80 percent when you use a Core i7, said Tom Peterson, Nvidia's technical marketing director. "Now, I was impressed by that claim, and I was trying to figure out how they could possibly say such a thing, and it turns out that Intel is basing that claim on only 3DMark Vantage’s CPU test."
Peterson went on to point out that the synthetic benchmark's CPU test doesn't actually measure game performance, and to say otherwise would be disingenuous. To drive his point home, Peterson showed Nvidia's own benchmarks of a Core 2 Duo E8400 machine outfitted with a GeForce GTS 250 videocard. The PC averaged 41.6 FPS in Nvidia's testing, and only increased to 42.4 FPS after upgrading to a Core i7 965. But after upgrading to a pair of GeForce GTX 260 videocards, that number jumped to 59.4 FPS.
"In real gaming, there's no difference between a Core i7 and a Core 2 Duo," Peterson concluded.
He also had plenty more to say, which you can read here.
Comments are closed on this article
unitymind
April 28, 2009 at 2:09pm
I just built a brand new machine with an i7 moderately overclocked
to 3.0 @ 1600mhz memory (6 gigs) with a GTX285 (oc'ed)I was getting 14-20 fps while raiding during boss fights with
everything on ultra settings (WTF!). I did some research and turned
off hyper-threading and it went up to ping 60fps. I saw with HT on
only one core was being used instead of two that they have it
optimized for in the game. The game is very CPU intensive since my
old Core 2 DUO oc'ed like a dream to 3.6+ on room air and always
pinged even in dal around 50-60 (mostly 60). Just OCing the processor
a few hertz I saw a vast improvement. In game like L4D I get very
clean powerful gaming and I am happy with the overall system. I would
have never upgraded to the core i7 and spent the money on it if I
thought I would get such poor results in Warcraft (since it is the
most used thing on the system). Encoding DVD or whatever I have
always used Anydvd and the mobile dvd application they have to
convert anything for my iPod and it takes the same time with the 2
core and the 4 core.Having to turn off the "hyper-threading" to get better
performance in Warcraft is a fail imo. Gordon this would be a good
topic on MaxPC podcast. Why do I get suck-crap performance?I still love my system :) - but really if you just want a KA
gaming system built a dual core system with the highest speed you can
find and spend extra money on some nice graphics card(s). The x58
board is still way overpriced.Any input appreciated.
Stry8993
April 27, 2009 at 8:03pm
Take it to 'em nVidia, now bring your prices to AMD levels, and get a better GPU Setup like AMD does, and you'll be back on everybodys... well... some peoples, good sides. nVidia GTX 360 and 380!!! Get your SH!T together.
PCIV
April 27, 2009 at 2:48pm
I'm thinking, just maybe, that with the 4500, it might actually prove true? or the 3100? or the 950?
schmitty6633
April 27, 2009 at 2:40pm
...And next time someone decides to encode a video instead of playing a game they would have wished they had got the Corei7. I mean c'mon Nvidia: Are you trying to make people buy year old cpu's?
Anyone agree with me?
big_montana
April 27, 2009 at 5:31pm
No, as the point of the article was a comparison between processors as to gaming, not video encoding. Blame Intel as they are the ones who said you get better GAMING performance.
GIJames
April 27, 2009 at 2:26pm
@ Cherry Picked: The point is to show that the GPU IS the bottleneck, and therefore that upgrading a videocard will increase performance more than the CPU.
methuselah
April 27, 2009 at 2:24pm
If your rig alerady supports a Core 2 Quad then I agree, upgrade your video card(s) if you're a gamer but for those that can only support a Core 2 Dual or Pentium D then you might as well go for Core i7. The 920 can be had for $230! Of course in this config you will need to upgrade to DDR3 which will add to the cost by about $100 for 6GB of decent name brand RAM.
I was recently in this situation and decided to spend the little extra to go with current technology. My reasoning was becasue the processor tech changes so quickly, I would rather not go one generation behind with my upgrade.
457R4L
April 27, 2009 at 2:07pm
This is a stupid demonstration of where a bottleneck lies using the GPU to show that it limited gains. This only shows that under some circumstances you will see limited performance gain. That doesn't mean that if a program whether a game or another application developed to leverage the i7 and SSE extensions wouldn't.
BaggerX
April 27, 2009 at 7:52pm
The demonstration was right on the money and proved that nVidia's claim of 80% GAME PERFORMANCE improvement is complete garbage. They say nothing about other applications, as that isn't the claim that they were addressing.
457R4L
April 27, 2009 at 9:07pm
I read this article a few days ago here http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13351&Itemid=1 . In my opinion it is not true and has more to do with nvidia posturing against intel because of motherboard licencing. showing one games fps comparing a nahalem to a wolfdale is apples and oranges. The fact is does the game use sse 4.2 or take advantage of the memory bandwidth from tri-channel, or use the extra cores. If not which it almost certainly doesn't... I'm not saying that Intel is correct in saying 80% improvement but nvidia isn't being completely honest either.
dag1992
April 27, 2009 at 1:51pm
Could it be because gaming is gpu and not cpu intensive? In all honesty this is a terrible way to lash out at Intel... only makes me more loyal to ATI.
Xyonix
April 27, 2009 at 2:23pm
Exactly... And all the more reason for nvidia to slam intel for stating such ridiculous claims. Seriously... someone had to do it. Anyone with any amount of knowledge on the subject knows that moving up to a core i7 processor isn't going to improve your performance in gaming by 80%. Hell for gaming alone, you aren't going to get much of any improvement at all (factual, and backed up by nvidia as well as many other hardware review sites). Unless your running dual GTX285's or something, then you start to see somewhat of an improvement. Certainly nothing like 80% though, maybe 8%...
