Quote Originally Posted by bamtan2 View Post
people say stuff like in this thread. but both cpus are so fast I'm super skeptical you can tell a difference. games are held back by the graphics card, and the cpu difference is always small...
Isn't this EXACTLY the point AMD are trying to demonstrate to people?

Yeah, XYZ benchmark shows a +1,000,000 CPU score better but the CPU can't do anything with it. Looks to me like they are 'trying' to bring some real world perspective to the synthetic benchmarks......and i accept it's to get CPU sales through that.

It's about time someone tried to match how pure benchmarking REALLY matters in real-life scenarios. Don't we all live in the real-world? Obviously not.

What is disappointing is that the sample size wasn't big enough to make people accept the results (or even conclusively disprove the assertion) and focus on the debate of WHY this was the case instead of the debate being centered around 'i don't believe it so it must have been a fix for reasons a, b, or c'.

I'm really interested in why brute force (cos that's what Intel is doing) is better than trying to be 'clever' (cos that's what AMD is doing otherwise they'd have copied Intel). I've got no idea which one is the best but would like to REALLY know why. I want to make INFORMED decisions.

If the surrounding hardware holds back the main components of a PC then other than for the sport of benchmarking why does it matter if i have the absolute top-end CPU for somehting like gaming?

I read the Techpowerup comparison of FX/Nehalem/SB on 7970 with interest because although the percentages difference at the end seemed rather large, when i had gone through the games looking at the FPS differences at the resolution i game at the differences weren't that big and apart from a few games (out of 15) the differences were negligible. Even the synthetic benchamrks were't much different yet at the end we have a 10 and 16 percent difference at the two highest resolutions in an overall 'summary'. I was really shocked at that so re-read it a few times to work out why my initial impression (during reading the article) was shattered by the final figures. These percentages were obviously skewed up by a handful of games that SB liked and FX didn't. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

The numbers were correct but the overall impression they left were wrong. I think in a limited way AMD have just proved what Techpowerup found with numbers. Maybe this type of experiment needs to be done more and in a further expansive way to drive PCs and gaming improvements down a better path.

The direction of these debates on here disappoints me because i see too much 'reason to fit hypothesis' statements rather than 'hypothesis drawn form reason' even though we have pages and pages in threads. More real debate please.