Posted on Saturday, April 25 2009 @ 9:11 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bit Tech
reports NVIDIA's marketing department is calling the Intel Core i7 processor a waste of money for gamers.
“You’re paying a pretty dear price to follow the Intel story of how to build the fastest PC for gaming”, said Petersen, as he showed a graph of how gaming performance scales with CPU upgrades. Petersen got his test results by adding together the frame rates from Crysis Warhead, Fallout 3, Call of Duty: World at War and Far Cry 2 at 1,920 x 1,200 (no AA or AF) and taking an average. With a Core 2 Duo E8400 and a GeForce GTS 250, the average was 41.6fps.
He then showed how this increased as you upgraded the CPU (the blue line in the graph above), and compared it to how the frame rate increased when you added another graphics card in SLI. The frame rate only increased to 42.4fps after upgrading to a Core i7 965, but jumped all the way up to 59.4fps after upgrading to a GeForce GTX 260 (216 stream processors) SLI setup.
This might seem obvious to those of us who know about how 3D acceleration works, but Petersen claims that the result is still “surprising to most people”. Petersen says that “it is a fact, that when you’re gaming and you’re running at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 or better, the Core 2 Duo is perfect for running all of today’s games. In real gaming, there’s no difference between a Core i7 and a Core 2 Duo.”
