Zloth
I smell a... wumpus!?
It's getting pretty difficult for me to understand what the CPU specs are even supposed to mean these days. The "recommended" specs for the up coming Watch Dogs game are:
Eight core - Intel Core i7-3770 @3.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 X8 @ 4 GHz
We've got a problem right off the bat as the i7-3770 has just 4 cores. So I guess hyperthreading virtual cores count?
My main problem, though, is that CPUs have basically been treading water for several years now. AMD and Intel are both playing to the mobile/laptop folks by reducing power and beefing up built in graphics. There is some monkeying around with the sizes of the instruction caching but raw speed and core count has been at a stand still. Yet the stats listed inevitably list CPUs that are fairly recent - something in stores now.
Right now I've got an old i7-980. According to PC-Mark 7 Entertainment benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, my old beast gets a score of 4897 while the AMD CPU listed gets a slightly lower 4881. So it looks like I should be good but the Intel CPU they list is the second best on the entire list with a score of 5539.
The other benchmarks seem to tell the same story. The listed AMD processor the fastest one listed but the Intel processor has a good bit higher score and quite a few processors between the listed CPU and the AMD processor.
So what are these things really? I know we already have a pretty soft term by saying "recommended" settings but come on, the CPUs should at least score fairly close to each other. They REALLY need to make tech demos we can download for free to check these things out.
Eight core - Intel Core i7-3770 @3.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 X8 @ 4 GHz
We've got a problem right off the bat as the i7-3770 has just 4 cores. So I guess hyperthreading virtual cores count?
My main problem, though, is that CPUs have basically been treading water for several years now. AMD and Intel are both playing to the mobile/laptop folks by reducing power and beefing up built in graphics. There is some monkeying around with the sizes of the instruction caching but raw speed and core count has been at a stand still. Yet the stats listed inevitably list CPUs that are fairly recent - something in stores now.
Right now I've got an old i7-980. According to PC-Mark 7 Entertainment benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, my old beast gets a score of 4897 while the AMD CPU listed gets a slightly lower 4881. So it looks like I should be good but the Intel CPU they list is the second best on the entire list with a score of 5539.
The other benchmarks seem to tell the same story. The listed AMD processor the fastest one listed but the Intel processor has a good bit higher score and quite a few processors between the listed CPU and the AMD processor.
So what are these things really? I know we already have a pretty soft term by saying "recommended" settings but come on, the CPUs should at least score fairly close to each other. They REALLY need to make tech demos we can download for free to check these things out.