BEST CPU FOR GAMERS : April 2014

udteam.tistory.com/647
Author : Daeguen Lee (DGLee)
Contact : leedaeguen [at] kaist.ac.kr
(Any action violating either CCL policy or copyright laws is strictly prohibited)



Introduction
So f ar, I've dealt with all "contemporaneous and properly-existing" CPUs in the market and
measured their gaming perf ormance. Reason why I did this is that, one should know at which level
one's system can run 3D games smoothly without being suf f ered f rom CPU-bottleneck, but it's
very hard to know because of the lack of inf ormation. For an individual, gathering SKUs f rom all
line-up and testing them under several scenario are very dif f icult tasks. Well, I did that all. Here we
start.

Criteria I used f or determining whether a CPU is "contemporaneous" and "properly-existing" are
as f ollow:
- Whether it is being replaced (by latter SKU, by the same price level) or not. For example,
IVB/Haswell or Trinity/Richland.
- Whether it is having (or providing) compatibility to the (company's) latest platf orm. (2011, 1150,
AM3+, FM2+...)


Test Setup & Methodology
Test system I used is composed as f ollow:


For your inf ormation: R4E / C5F imply RAMPAGE IV EXTREME and CROSSHAIR V FORMULA
respectively. Since K version of Haswell Ref resh wouldn't be appear at the f irst release, I
"assume" that 4790K and 4690K would have the same spec as 4790/4690 so as 4770K/4670K f or
their own non-K sisters. (That's why K letters are in bracket) For LGA2011 platf orm, there used 4
4GB DIMMs to enabling all quad channels while otherwise only two of them are used.
Note that f or every game title, all graphics quality options in in-game control panel are set to the
highest possible settings. For example, f or Battlef ield 4 I used an "Ultra" preset as well as
"DX11+DDOF" f or Bioshock : Inf inite benchmark.

Let's get the theory part f inished. Here's the result.
Every result is f olded right under the title of each chapter. Click to see f ull context.


Result
(1) 3DMark 11
Click to see results



(2) 3DMark 2013
Click to see results





(3) Aliens vs Predator
Click to see results





(4) Batman : Arkham City
Click to see results






(5) Battlefield 4
Click to see results






(6) Bioshock : Infinite
Click to see results






(7) Crysis : Warhead
Click to see results






(8) Crysis 3
Click to see results




(9) DiRT : Showdown
Click to see results






(10) Hitman : Absolution
Click to see results






(11) Just Cause 2
Click to see results






(12) Lost Planet 2
Click to see results






(13) Metro 2033
Click to see results






(14) Metro : Last Light
Click to see results





(15) Sleeping Dogs
Click to see results






(16) Sniper Elite V2
Click to see results






(17) Tomb Raider
Click to see results






Performance Summary
In this article, summarization drives in two ways: one is just summing up all results (f ramerates of
all games) thus make us enable to compare accumulated f ramerates each as an abstraction of
perf ormance. Another way is taking arithmetic average of relative perf ormances of all games. In
this case, all results (of a certain game/test) are to be normalized by the value Core i7 4960X
obtained in that game/test. Because each game has its own characteristics, f or example, A game
is f avor in AMD while B game shows the contrary, accumulated f ramerate doesn't nessesarily
mean average relative perf ormance. To be simple, both approaches may drive you to dif f erent
conclusions. Note that I personally weigh the latter f ar more than the f ormer.

Here's summaries f or 1680 x 1050 resolution.



Since dual-core A-series APUs (A6 6400K and A4 6300) are incapable of running Crysis 3 and
Sleeping Dogs, I excluded these two games f or accumulation (Simply, if not, accumulated
f ramerate of them would surely be def eated even by any of Kabini competitors. It doesn't make
sense) and so as f or obtaining average relative perf ormance. Thus only A6 6400K and A4 6300
have denominator two less than others. This manner is also applied to below two scenarios -
1920 x 1080 and 2560 x 1600 resolutions.

Here's 1920 x 1080 summaries.



Here's the last - 2560 x 1600.



Hurray!!!! The whole graphs are over.


Conclusion
Okay. Let's check what we've learn f rom this article out.

(Blahblah... I'll f inish up the commentary asap.)