Intel quad vs Amd Octa Core

[homerdog]

RAGE is maybe the most threaded game? Its texture transcode likes more cores.

That is not a good example of a game that needs a lot of CPU power.

 

[I.S.T.]

Why not? I mean, on a technical level and not a "is the game fun" level.

 

[homerdog]

Well it doesn't seem to require a lot of CPU power although it is very difficult to tell since there is no way to get useful benchmark results from it that I know of.

 

[swaaye]

The most obvious benefit with super-fast transcode speed is reducing rate at which the annoying placeholder textures disappear when you spin around.

NV GPU transcode is maybe the best approach though. It seemed to work very well with my 560.

 

[Arwin]

I thought the placeholder texture thing was bottlenecked by harddrive speed?

 

[homerdog]

It's all entirely subjective anyway since like I said there's no good way to test it. There is a transcode benchmark, but at what point does faster transcoding stop making a perceivable impact? Nobody knows as far as I can tell, and it would seem that all modern x86 CPUs are capable of running the game smoothly. Remember it was designed to run on console CPUs which pale in comparison to even x86 CPUs from as far back as 2007.
Also transcoding is not the only thing the CPU does while you're playing Rage. All the other game code has to run at the same time. So there is no way at all to produce benchmark results that could be meaningful to your gameplay experience. It is literally the worst game in the history of 3D gaming for benchmarking. There have been in-depth articles written about how useless it is as a benchmark.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4970/rage-against-the-benchmark-machine

That said, I think the quality scaling they do to maintain FPS is a good idea and I wish more engines would implement it. With an option of course to turn it off so we can run benchmarks.

That was just a bit off topic...

 

[Arwin]

I only remember it because on PS3 it was tested by replacing the internal HDD with an SSD, and that pretty much eliminated texture pop-in on that machine. Of course a high-end PC with high detail may have other bottlenecks, but there too putting in an SSD would definitely help reveal what bottleneck is more prominent.