The ATI Radeon 5XXX Thread

[Calmatory]

I still wanna know what does it take to fully take advantage of HD5870 CF? A core i7 @4.0Ghz at least?

Impossible question. It is matter of TASTE actually. In some situations, CPU can be somewhat slowing down, in some situations the GPU. And in some situations the actual "bottleneck" can be the PCI-E bus.


It depends on:
software/game used
settings
the actual scene in the game
drivers
GPU/VRAM speed
CPU/RAM speed
PCI-E bus bandwidth.

So yes, talking about "CPU only" here, it is practically impossible to say accurately. There will always be someone arguing about it. Maybe a 4 GHz i7 can sustain it most of the time without causing major bottleneck, but for sure 7 GHz i9 with 8 cores would do MUCH better still. No one knows, a matter of taste and opinion.

And before someone comes raging that "omg put slow cpu and your fps drops"(sure it does), I suggest "you" to imagine WHY it happens. Hint: Time spent(per frame) by: CPU(both processing and data retrieval from RAM), PCI-E bus data transfer latency, GPU(both processing and data retrieval from VRAM).