Gadgetory

hey guys welcome back to harbor unboxed today I'm going to try and tackle a topic that seems you causing a great deal of confusion amongst viewers and this can be seen in the comment section the topic is GPU bottlenecks and I really want to discuss how they impact rhizomes gaming performance there is a huge mix of different results regarding writes and gaming performance and a big part of that has to do with GPU bottlenecks right now I am testing the Rison 7 1800 X and 1700 X processors in over a dozen game at 1080p and 1440p and I'll also be testing with SMT enabled and disabled before I get to that though let's rewind a bit throughout the creation of my Rison review I constantly confirm results with other youtubers Brian over at Tech City for example was a big help and so too was Kevin from tech showdown we spent many late nights on a 3-way Skype chat trying to work out what exactly was going on interestingly we all had different motherboards though we were using the latest biased revisions and yet we were all seeing the same average 1080p gaming performance despite all agreeing that the productivity performance was incredible now that the reviews are live I've spent countless hours sifting through data trying to work out exactly what's going on unfortunately very few media outlets seem to provide useful gaming data in my opinion apart from the guys that I worked closely with such as Brian and Kevin I was also very impressed with the testing done by gamers Nexus gamers Nexus has since confirmed they are 100% behind their results which is great as their results are in line with my own naturally there is a difference in the actual frame rates reported as we use different hardware and tested different sections of each game however the margins themselves are much the same we both found that Rison was a good bit slower than the 7700 K and 6100 K processors in watchdogs 2 we also found similar battlefield 1 performance which saw rising appetitive in both tests that said the Intel processors raced ahead for the average results in my review likely due to the fact that I used to tighten XP and they used to GTX 1080 and probably we tested different sections of the game so as I said I'm currently in the process of testing a huge amount of games with the horizon 7 1800 X and 1700 X processors against the usual suspects I now have the gigabyte X 370 gaming 5 on hand with the latest bias and I've also strapped on a nice big all-in-one liquid cooler for good measure I have found some interesting results but for the most part they do just confirm what I found in my day 1 testing before I release that video on Monday I wanted to try and address the issue of GPU bottlenecks by explaining when and where you are seeing them and why admittedly I'm not the best at explaining this stuff and I haven't really ever tried to do so in the past so this video is kind of a bit different from the norm so bear with me as I try to explain what's going on firstly why is avoiding a GPU bottleneck so important for testing and understanding CPU performance you could test at the 4k resolution like some have and show that the rise in CPUs can indeed match the high-end skylake and cable 8 models when using the gtx 1080 or even the titan XP it's true the chair DX for example can match the 7700 k at 4k and the latest games using most high-end GPUs so does that mean the 1800 X is as fast or possibly even faster than the 7700 K we know this isn't true because we have tested at 1080p with the 7700 K and it was quite a bit faster in most cases now you might say Steve I don't care about 1080p gaming I have an ultra-wide 1440p display so I only care about how rise and performs here now that's fine albeit you are sticking your head in the sand and that can come back to bite you down the track before I explain why let me just touch on why I test it at 1080p and why the 4k results at least on their own are completely useless if you do test at turn BP technically you don't need to show 4k results whereas if you test it 4k you very much need to show 1080p performance here's a hypothetical example let's say the Titan XP is capable of rendering a minimum of 40 FPS in battlefield 1 at 4k now if we benchmark hospitals and CPUs which includes some core i3 i5 i7 and even riser models all of which can allow the Titan XP to deliver its optimal 4k performance does that mean they're equal in terms of gaining performance it certainly appears so when looking exclusively at 4k however it really just means they're all capable of keeping the framerate at above 40 FPS at all times by lowering the resolution and/or quality settings which reduces GPU load we now start to show the CPU is the weakest link you can do this by testing extremely low resolution such as 720p with low quality settings and that's perfectly fine though for me you're going a bit too far the other way I've found that at 1080p using high or ultra-high type quality settings using a Pascal Titan X is a realistic configuration for measuring CPU gaming performance so other than showing that there may actually be a real difference between certain CPUs in games why else should you ensure that your results are being shaped by a GPU bottleneck or why is it a bad idea to stick your head in the sand by saying you only care about how they compare it ultra light or 4k resolutions well for the longest time myself and other respected tech reviewers claimed that all gamers need is a Core i5 processor as you reach a point of diminishing returns at the core i7 when gaming this was true about a year ago and of course there really wasn't much evidence that suggested otherwise of course we often noted that things will no doubt change in the future we just didn't know how far into the future now a year later things have changed games are now more demanding though I feel the biggest change has been made to GPUs themselves this time last year the GTX 980 and furia graphics cards were considered real weapons yes they were faster GPUs like the Maxwell Titan X or fury X but you still couldn't say though anything less than high-end today though they can be considered as mid-range with GPU such as a Titan XP and soon-to-be-released GTX 1080i delivering over twice as much performance in many cases if we compare the core i5 7600 K and core i7 7700 K in CPU demanding games using the GTX 980 at 1080p the 8 threaded i7 processor really isn't much faster given the margins I would say get the Core i5 the core i7 simply isn't worth the extra investment I recently compared the Pentium G 4560 core i3 7350 K along with the i-5 7600 K an i7 6700k using the geforce gtx 1050 - i gtx 1060 and gtx 1080 if we look at a game such as hitman we see that the i5 and i7 processors are on par when testing with the gtx 1060 which is equivalent to the gtx 1080 in terms of performance looking at those results the core i7 is clearly a bad investment however if we test with the more powerful GT X 1080 the core i7 processor is now deliver over 20 percent more performance and that's huge increasing the resolution to 1440p we see that when testing with the gtx 1060 the dual core Pentium processor delivers the same performance as the i7 6700k the 6700 K is obviously a much more powerful CPU but the GPU bottleneck simply hides the fact that said using a more powerful GPU in the GTX 1080 we see that the 6700 K is now 43% faster than the G 4560 however 1440p we now find the 6700 K is just 6 percent faster than the 7600 K whereas it was as much as 23% faster at 1080p I found similar margins in games such as mafia 3 overwatch total war Warhammer and many others if you want to watch that video and see the results in more detail I'll add the link in the video description keeping those results in mind the Titan XP and soon-to-be-released GTX 1080i are much faster than the GTX 1080 again so the rise in gaming performance that you saw in my review and other higher quality reviews from outlets who tested correctly such as gamers Nexus and Thomas Hardware we can assume a few things firstly have games in the future aren't able to better utilize the Rison processes and they are presently that is to say optimization doesn't occur then the misleading for Cara's alts become an even bigger issue in a few years time when the gtx 1080i or AMD is upcoming Vega GPUs go from high-end to mid-range contenders how will rise and look in regards to the current skylake and kb lake processes presumably the 4k performance would start to look like what we're seeing at 1080p the other side of that of course being if games are able to better utilize horizon which is of course my hope then we will start to see the 8 core 16 thread AMD processes laying waste to intel's four core 8 threaded core i7 cable lake and skylake cpus the obvious problem being we just don't know how this is going to play out I remember fanboys giving me a hard time back in 2011 when I said the fx-8150 just doesn't deliver especially in games the argument at the time was that games only used 1 to 2 cores and by the time now using 4 cores or more the FX series would prevail well no need to dredge that up all over again we know how it played out that's that I have much more hope for Eisen and I honestly do believe there is more performance to be seen yet to the opposite for the FX series so that's something okay likes everything I wanted to cover on the subject for now I hope this helps those of you who were confused by the varying results and now have a better understanding of where and why a GPU bottleneck is occurring and more importantly why it should be avoided when showing CPU performance as always if you guys have any questions please drop them below and I will do my best to address them as quickly as possible I'm your host Steve catch again soon