Hardware acceleration benefit from X-fi in games

[chuckskull]

I know I'm GPU limited, just because I run everything at 1600x1200. Depends on your whole setup, not just one part.

[Smokey21]

If you want the front panel, you can get the X-Fi Plat. The Fatality, has 64mb of ram, and your paying more the name as well.

[Chunkers]

Thanks all for the feedback, even though I really want the front panel I can't justify the extra ££££ so I'll probably get the Extreme Music OEM, enjoy the sounds and the sound quality.

I'm guessing I'll be GPU limited in most games for the time being anyway

Chz

Chunks

[Butcher]

Almost all games are CPU limited on current hardware, especially if you have a high end GFX card. The faster your GFX card the easier it is to become CPU limited. GPUs are getting faster at a mugh higher rate than CPUs which only compounds the problem. DX10 will help, but that's still way off.

Here's a couple of (fairly technical) docs about CPU limits:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...ows_Titles.asp
http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3D...imisations.pdf

Really? I thought you only need something like a 2ghz AMD64 part to not be limited up to something like a 7900GT - depending on the game/resolution of course.

For something like 3dmark that's true, but for actual games where there's a lot more than rendering eating CPU time it's not the case at all.

[Chunkers]

Almost all games are CPU limited on current hardware, especially if you have a high end GFX card. The faster your GFX card the easier it is to become CPU limited. GPUs are getting faster at a mugh higher rate than CPUs which only compounds the problem. DX10 will help, but that's still way off.

It depends on the resolution and detail level, at modestly high resolutions with most modern processors you are limited by the GPU unless you have a mega-crossfire / SLI setup?

I want to run games like BF2 and Oblivion at the native resolution of my monitor which is 1680 x 1050. I hope to install an E6600, at this kind of resolution even dual X1900XT are GPU limited.

This is based on what I read on Anandtech :

If you are simply interested in maximum processor performance, P965 with any of the Core 2 Duo parts is going to be very fast. Gamers on the other hand are probably going to at least want to think about SLI/CrossFire, as typical gaming settings will be GPU limited with just about any current single GPU.

Cheers

Chunks

[Butcher]

Difficult to say without benching the actual system. It's really easy to get CPU limited though, unless you're really thrashing the graphics effects (and to be fair oblivion doesn't shirk in that respect) you can become GPU limited even at high resolution.

One thing to note is that dual core doesn't benefit the vast majority of games. Pretty much all games are effectively single threaded, so having the extra core makes no difference at all. CPU clock speed is king when it comes to games.

Don't forget an X1900 can excute around 20 billion shader ops per second. If you're running at 60 FPS that means you can spend around 187 ops per pixel at your res. That's a LOT of shader work even with overdraw in.

[kalniel]

We'll it's very easy to tell if you're GPU limited or not - just change the resolution of the game and see if it affects frame rates.

Only if you can change the resolution without any affect on framerates are you CPU limited.