Bulldozer's Got Game (8150 + CFX 7970's)

EDIT: I have learned what a real bottleneck is. What I thought a bottleneck was at the time of this test was different from the real meaning. I will leave the results up, but please read the whole thread to see the full conversation before leaving your thoughts.

It seems that everyone is on a “Bulldozer sucks” bandwagon, judging a product based on how it under delivered from what everyone hyped it up to be. While the IPC, clock per clock performance, performance per watt, and Power consumption are an utter disgrace compared to the competition, the FX line of processors are not nearly as bad as everyone says and frankly the negative hype is bigger and less realistic than the positive hype before launch (I think people are still bitter about the Pentium 4's ).

I can't tell you how many times people have told me that My FX-8150 would bottleneck just one 7970, let alone 2 7970's in CFX. I knew based on the math I did in my head from benchmark results that what they claimed was not true, so when I finally got my second 7970, I began running benchmarks, and what I saw was a pretty decent CPU that gets bashed WAY too much.

The test bench (Phantom's Blood)
CPU: Stock FX-8150 (Stock Clocked at 3.6GHz)
Motherboard: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX
RAM: 4X 4GB Patriot Viper Extreme Division 2 1866 (Stock Clocked at 1333MHz)*
GPU0: ASUS Radeon 7970 3GB Refrence card (Stock Clocked at 925MHz)
GPU1: ASUS Radeon 7970 3GB DirectCU II (Underclocked from 1GHz to 925MHz)*
PSU: 850W Enermax Platimax Quad-Rail Power Supply
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB

Each game was tested with each graphical setting as high as available. If I said “Highest presets”, that means that some of the highest settings were “High” while others were “Very High”. Everything was set to the highest settings available to stress my hardware and magnify any bottlenecks.

*NOTE: The reason why my 1866 RAM is at 1333MHz and my DirectCU II 1GHz card is at 925MHz is because I wanted to test out of the box performance an average user would have. Eventually, I will run the same tests with my CPU overclocked as High as I can push it (Currently 4.4GHz) and My GPU's at 1.125MHz to demonstrate potential performance. Also note these benchmarks were run using Catalyst 12.7 Beta drivers as well as BOTH FX 8150 CPU Hotfixes in Windows 7.

So lets get started with the the 8150's worst nightmare, a Highly CPU intensive game that can't use anything more than 2 cores. Crysis.






As we can see, there is a CPU Bottleneck of epic proportions. I can understand why people bash this CPU so much just based on this game. In fact, I was getting 37FPS average before I added my second card. Luckily for me, I only played Crysis for the storyline, and haven't touched it until today.

Next we move on to Crysis 2, a more core “aware” game (Still only uses 4 cores). Before taking a look at the results, there is currently an issue since Catalyst 11.6 with all AMD cards and the DX11 patch that causes Half of the graphical performance it should be getting. These results are an AMD/ATI issue, not an FX issue, so take these readings with a grain of salt. What makes me believe this, is the fact that I notice no frame drops whatsoever while looking directly at explosions. If you don't believe me, then we will have to wait until someone runs this benchmark with 2 GTX 680's @ 925MHz and an 8150, or until this issue get resolved.






Now we see the 8150 get better as more cores are used, with a highly playable 61FPS average, more than double what Crysis spit out, and IMHO better looking too.

Even thought this next title is only D3D9 compliant, I thought I would throw it in with the other games. I play this game a considerable amount, and I think it's pretty nice looking. I was curious to see how well this game used my hardware too.






Using only 3 of my 8 cores, there is a slight CPU bottleneck, by about 5-10%, but At an average of 76FPS, I'm not complaining.

By now people will think I'm trolling for unicorns. “The Source Engine? What the hell is this guy doing? It's only D3D9 and not hardware intensive at all!”. I spend about 40% of my gaming time playing Source based games, thus I thought it was important to include it. Also, I feel the Source engine represent what we can expect to see in the future for mainstream videogames. As more and more are becoming console ports (I realize that the Source Engine is NOT a console port, but still, my point is the same), game engines will just be lighter weight in general. Seeing as I built this machine to be a longevity machine, it's good to know I'll be able to use this as long as the parts last without having to make upgrades. GABEN!!






I think these results speak for themselves.


Dirt 3 is a very popular benchmarking game. It is D3D11 compliant, very core aware, and Incredibly lightweight. In terms of PC only games, I feel that Dirt 3 is a fair representation of what we can expect to see in the future because of these traits.






What we can see now, is close to no bottlenecks. This means that the Bulldozer is a perfect match for 2 7970's. Young love is so cute. <3

Ah, Battlefield 3. This game is what eats up 50% of my gametime, more than any other game I own. This game is also the main reason I got a second 7970. I'm a stickler for +50 FPS, and I wanted to maintain that when I upgrade to a 2560x1440 monitor this September.










Wow oh wow, what is this ladies and gentlemen? A GPU BOTTLENECK!?!?!? No, it can't be! Your eyes are not deceiving you, 2 7970's are actually bottlenecking my 8150 at stock! Now I'm not recommending a tri-fire setup by any stretch of the imagination. I will never trust more than 3 GPU's with anything more than a 2600k. I just wanted all the AMD Haters to eat their ^&*#)$% words.

As I said with Dirt 3, BF3 with the Frostbite 2 engine is the perfect representation of PC Video Games down the road. That is Multithreaded, the GPU's Scale well, and can deal with any hardware.

CONCLUSION:
The AMD FX-8150 at stock speeds is and amazing processor. It can handle Multi-GPU setups with ease in newer games. Some people say that the Bulldozer was too late, as it was supposed to take on the first generation core iX series from Intel. I disagree, I feel based on these results that the Bulldozer is ahead of its time. Most Games and Applications aren't even ready for 6 cores let alone 4. Right now, a 2500k vs FX8150 will leave the 2500k as the clear winner. But my particular build is a longevity build. 5 or so years down the road, I feel that my 8150 will wipe the floor with a 2500k. The Bulldozer will prove itself more and more overtime, we just need to give it a chance. The upcoming Windows 8 is supposed to have a tweaked kernel to handle the Bulldozer architecture better. There is just a small fact to prove my point. Let me know what you think, you may argue in favor of intel, but I ask you very kindly to not hate. Us AMD users are well aware nothing can dethrone a 2500k or higher.

I will benchmark more games and add them to this thread upon request. Also, look out for these benchmarks I'm planning to run later down the road:

8120 + CFX 7970's
8150 @ 4.8GHz + CFX 7970's @ 1.125MHz
Left 4 Dead 2 Performance, Linux VS Windows 7
(All of the above @ both 1920x1080 and 2560x1440, I will update this test once I get a 1440p monitor)

Thanks for reading!
-cre8ive65
Edited by cre8ive65 - 7/31/12 at 10:50am

In your spoiler, you show the 3770K vs 8150 Clock for Clock. I explicitly state that the bulldozer cannot compete with anything else clock for clock. Just under the specs of the testbench, I stated I wanted to see out of the box performance, meaning stock speeds. The performance difference wouldn't be as big.

From my understanding based on what this very community taught me, a GPU bottleneck is when the GPU load is higher than the CPU load in a game, whereas a CPU bottleneck is when CPU load is higher than GPU load, hence why I included usage charts.

I wanted to do 3 things with this post:
1) Make people who made the mistake of buying a bulldozer (Myself included) not feel so bad about it.
2) Show that the Bulldozer is capable of taking advantage Dual GPU's when several communities said that it was impossible.
3) Make the point that the bulldozer (especially the 81X0 series) will prove themselves down the road

Also take a look at my usage chart for dirt 3. It uses all 8 cores, and from my understanding Dirt 2 uses only 4. I don't know if I made myself clear in my tests, but the Bulldozer will do better for every core it uses, that's its strongsuit. Intel's is Quality, AMD's is Quantity.

Thanks for coming up with an in depth response, helps me learn more about Rig building/benchmarking.

Yupp, lines up with my results, that's why BF3 works so well with my 8150. It also supports my argument that the 8150 will prove itself down the road.