NVIDIA GTX 595 (picture+Details)

[trinibwoy]

So why is it that there is it that a $230 CPU can accept virtually any multi-GPU configuration and offer virtually no bottlenecks in gameplay? The Sandy Bridge i5/i7's are very powerful and offer up extremely high framerates if the GPU is fast enough to keep up with it.

Sorry, but I think GPUs are holding back current CPUs, and those CPUs are on dinky coolers too. In essence, a 300+ watt GPU is holding back a 95-watt CPU from reaching its full potential... something is wrong with that picture.

I really don't understand what you're asking. 3D rendering is an extremely compute intensive process and the vast majority of that burden falls to the graphics card. What do you mean by the GPU is the bottleneck? The reason a cheap dinky CPU is good enough is because 3D rendering is a mostly GPU intensive task. Anybody who follows this scene should know that.

Try rendering a game on your CPU and see how well your 95w CPU does at that task.

[Mad Pistol]

I really don't understand what you're asking. 3D rendering is an extremely compute intensive process and the vast majority of that burden falls to the graphics card. What do you mean by the GPU is the bottleneck? The reason a cheap dinky CPU is good enough is because 3D rendering is a mostly GPU intensive task. Anybody who follows this scene should know that.

Try rendering a game on your CPU and see how well your 95w CPU does at that task.

That's not what I'm talking about. There are plenty of tasks for a CPU to do. It is running the rest of the computer's programs as well. A single core CPU doesn't cut it anymore. That's why we have 4 and 6 core CPUs. Also, GPU's will always be better at their given tasks. A GPU with hundreds of cores is far better at chucking out pixels very quickly than a few cores from the CPU. However, a CPU is much better at taking linear instructions.

What I'm saying is that a very CPU intensive game such as BC2 can be maxed out on a high-powered dual core or a mediocre quad core, and the framerate will remain above 60 FPS if the video cards are powerful enough. It calculates a lot of stuff. Gun shots/hit detection, environmental interactions, physics calculations, plotting character movement and AI interactions, etc. On top of all that, it runs any sorts of programs the OS is running in the back ground as well, including the sound driver, video driver, hardware controllers, etc. The CPU is the brain of the computer. Somehow, that dinky CPU can do a ton of stuff while the GPU is completely devoted to rendering in games.

For reference, I bet we could have games that uses twice as much CPU resources as BC2, and if you get a SB i5/i7 CPU (around $230) a $110 motherboard, and $50 worth of memory, it will chew it up and spit it right back in your face. You do the same thing for games (create a game that uses twice as much rendering power) and the best video cards out there will choke and sputter, even the uber powerful $1000 video card setups. Hell, we still can't max out Crysis at 60 FPS without spending $1000+ on video hardware. Even a couple 6990's can't keep Crysis above 60 FPS the entire time. (Start @ 17:49 for Crysis) That game was released 4 years ago. Why is it still a benchmark for which hardware companies are trying to overcome?


GPUs are very complex pieces of hardware. No doubt. But a GPU cannot function on its own with out a CPU to drive it. A GPU does not render that scene by itself unless it's programmed to do so. It still has to have the coordinates for rendering and other instructions given by the CPU. That's why a benchmark like Heaven requires about 5-20% of CPU power to run flawlessly, even though it has virtually no AI or interactions requiring CPU power.