Intel Core i3-6320, the ultimate Arma CPU?

[fabio_chavez 103]

I was planning to get an i7-6700k but its really overpriced and in short supply, now im considering to switch to i3-6320, which is 1/3 of the price of the i7 and actually looks like it is a decent CPU  for arma (3,9ghz, 2 Cores + Hyperthreadding), has anybody experience with it allready? The unlocked i7 has in average 600-700mhz more WHEN OVERCLOCKED and costs ~220€ MORE. 

for spec compairsion see link:
http://www.technikaffe.de/cpu_vergleich-intel_core_i3_6320-552-vs-intel_core_i7_6700k-518

[forteh 11]

A dual core processor just isn't up to playing arma unfortunately. When I first got the game I had an i3 530 running at 4.7ghz and it would pull around 35 fps on the altis benchmark.  My i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz pulls 70 fps on the same benchmark with much higher settings. In reality this equates to around 50-60 fps in the single player campaign with a mixture of high and very high settings.

 

Granted it's a much later generation processor and architecture but there is a reason why it's so much cheaper - it has so much less grunt.

[fabio_chavez 103]

but consider its 6th gen not first gen and has hyperthreading?

[chortles 263]

A dual core processor just isn't up to playing arma unfortunately. When I first got the game I had an i3 530 running at 4.7ghz and it would pull around 35 fps on the altis benchmark.  My i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz pulls 70 fps on the same benchmark with much higher settings. In reality this equates to around 50-60 fps in the single player campaign with a mixture of high and very high settings.

 

Granted it's a much later generation processor and architecture but there is a reason why it's so much cheaper - it has so much less grunt.

Irony: more cores is no help with AMD, but fewer cores/higher clock is no help with Intel.

[forteh 11]

but consider its 6th gen not first gen and has hyperthreading?

 

The 530 is hyperthreading, unfortunately there just isn't the same IPC horsepower to drive arma3; the hyperthreading takes spare cycles from the two logical cores and unloads them to two virtual cores, however the i3 (being a office machine / desktop marketed cpu) just cannot process the information quickly enough and gets bogged down.  I would imagine that 6th gen will give a boost but nothing compared to an i5/i7 of any generation.

 

From my i3 530 I upgraded to an i5 750 (same motherboard so just a cpu plug in for £40) and that was significantly faster than the i3 to the tune of about 15-20 fps on the benchmark and it made it completely playable, I upgraded to the 2500k because it came at a very good price with the motherboard and processor.  From my experience an i7 is wasted on arma3, a sandybridge onwards i5 with a decent overclock and fast ram is the sweetspot.  On my 2500k and gtx660 I generally see cpu core load at around 80/60/40/40% and gpu load at 75-80%, this is with 2250/2250 view distance and all settings on high or very high.

[clawhammer 10]

Even the mighty i7 6700 can get easly wasted in arma 3 :lol:

[fabio_chavez 103]

i didnt expect the i3 to beat the unlocked i7 in arma but i was hoping for solid (for arma) performance.
The trick was to stay on the i3 until Zen launches and then reconsider wether to upgrade platform (hopefully for less money than right now) or switch platform.
Im pissed by intels shady sells tactics on the launch of this CPU generation and milking people as monopolist (inb4: capistalism; AMD is lame; i would do the same).

 

[forteh 11]

Or just buy a 2500k/3570k/4670k, save a bucket of cash and gloat over the fact you have a machine that plays arma just as well* as a 6700k :D

 

*dropping down to 25 fps in kavala when the server can't keep up!

[fabio_chavez 103]

i dont want to invest in a old platform after spending 8 years on my last one, i allready have a 1151 board and ddr4 btw :)

update: the i3s popped up in stores this minute (was like f5ing this morning :v ), i assume the prices will now drop for a period of 4 weeks, so if anybody has some definite information on wether 2 cores with hyperthreadding on 3,9ghz and the latest IPC performance (plus 3000mhz Rams) will do a decent job or not, feel free to share. 

E.g. what would be the effect of 2 cores 4 threads 4mb l3 cache in compairsion to the i5 4 cores 4 threads 6mb l3 cache in therms of absolute average performance in arma? is it worth 100-150€?

[forteh 11]

i dont want to invest in a old platform after spending 8 years on my last one, i allready have a 1151 board and ddr4 btw :)

update: the i3s popped up in stores this minute (was like f5ing this morning :v ), i assume the prices will now drop for a period of 4 weeks, so if anybody has some definite information on wether 2 cores with hyperthreadding on 3,9ghz and the latest IPC performance (plus 3000mhz Rams) will do a decent job or not, feel free to share. 

E.g. what would be the effect of 2 cores 4 threads 4mb l3 cache in compairsion to the i5 4 cores 4 threads 6mb l3 cache in therms of absolute average performance in arma? is it worth 100-150€?

 

Fair shout :)

 

In my opinion yes it's worth the extra money, as much as people whinge and moan about arma3s multicore support, it does use 4 cores (although it doesn't load them all up 100%) and two cores will get overwhelmed because hyperthreading relies on there being spare cycles on the logical cores.  Even if you consider a generous 50% IPC increase from 1st to 6th gen i3 processors that would give around 45-50 fps in the altis benchmark basing it on my hours of testing with the i3 530@4.7ghz.  The 2500k at stock 3.2ghz outperformed the overclocked i3, the extra cores and increased cache is where it comes from.

 

On a side note, I also use my machine for solidworks (notoriously single threaded because of how solid modellers are written) where single core speed if generally king, again the i5 trounces the old i3 by a good margin, it's only loading up one core but it is just lacking.

[fabio_chavez 103]

lol, i consider to reship my z170 board and order a kaveri system instead to wait for zen...

 

"A recent study shows that the slump in PC sales in the first half was deliberately made to help Skylake sell better since August. Initially analysts believed that sales of the Skylake are hindered by existing stocks of previous Haswells, but it turns out this was untrue.

Tech Trader Daily has found that Intel significantly reduced shipments of its central processing units in the first half of the year, to leave PC maker inventories drained and empty."

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/processors/38852-intel-slowed-pc-sales-to-increase-skylake-s-price

[jumpinghubert 49]

you can´t overclock this cpu. Maybe instead of a i7 and a i3 a i5 is a good choice..

[SaOk 112]

I have understood the CPUs have only for 10-20% faster than what we had 5 years ago. E.g. there is not much meaning to replace i7 2600k unless getting 6core i7-5820K or faster and even then its up to game/program how much it uses it.

[ceeeb 147]

I have understood the CPUs have only for 10-20% faster than what we had 5 years ago. E.g. there is not much meaning to replace i7 2600k unless getting 6core i7-5820K or faster and even then its up to game/program how much it uses it.

 

For Arma 3, 6700k is about 50% more FPS than 2600k. See: http://www.hardware.fr/articles/940-15/cpu-jeux-3d-crysis-3-arma-iii.html

 

For the Intel Core CPUs, each generation has been about 10-15% more powerful (per core per GHz),so the new I7 6700K is finally around twice the speed of my six year old I7 950.

[fabio_chavez 103]

Those are more like the marketing numbers and i have yet to see that the 6700k will help u in MP in kavala over a decently overclocked 2600k in a way that would justify 400€

[domokun 515]

Those are more like the marketing numbers and i have yet to see that the 6700k will help u in MP in kavala over a decently overclocked 2600k in a way that would justify 400€

Sorry but those are not "marketing numbers". Hardware.fr is long-standing and respected website. They wouldn't ruin their reputation with "marketing numbers". Buy if you take a moment to read it more clearly, you'll see that the gains are pretty small, i.e. only +2 or +3 fps per generation. Honestly I get the impression that the CPU wars have really slowed in the last 5 years. The last revolution seems to have been Sandy Bridge (i5-2500k et Co.) and since then we've only seen evolutions. So unless you're running an AMD, provided your quad core runs at 4+ GHz, there's doesn't seem to any major incentive to upgrade.

[SaOk 112]

Its more around +40% or bit less, but still more promising than I had read before somewhere. Quite fun results with those 6core CPU that give only few % boost over 2600K in Arma3. But having high hopes from DX12, maybe multicores become more used in many games. Definitely would like to jump into 6 core next.

 

Not sure if the CPU wars have silenced. I think its more that they have reached the limits how small chips they can create. We can only hope they finally would find superconductors. The current CPUs would start look like some slow amigas then.

[old_painless 183]

With AMD struggling, Intel is not getting as much competition. So there are no wars, as Intel won already. Probably why we are only seeing marginal improvements per new "generation" of CPU. Hope that some chinese manufacturer steps up, like with smartphones

[fabio_chavez 103]

Skylakes improvement over haswell unlocked i7 is ~8%... But if you want to believe what some internetsites say that merely reflect what intel claims and uses calculated benchmarks then you are free to do so...

As for AMD no competition, anybody remembers the record breaking lawsuit when intel had to pay some billions to the EU for screwing AMD over?

Intels is perceived as so clever but after all the core roadmap didnt bring any meaningful innovation to mid-highend desktop users since 2500k... the whole roadmap is kind of a fraud in that regard. They drain innovation from desktop cpus in behalf of the mobile market while they fail on the moblie market.. i wish for intel to get blown out of the water by samsung and to be kicked in the nuts by Zen for artificially shortening the skylake supply to milk the customers to the maximum... Greedy monopolists :)

[schadler17 36]

My question is, which cpu will bring the highest fps in a multiplayer environment that is both script heavy and also modded? People say single threaded processors are the way to go, which by the link below would suggest the I7 4790k.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

I'm not really too smart with all this, but from what I've heard, arma doesn't utilize a lot of threads, so increasing the performance of the ones it does use should help, right?

[fabio_chavez 103]

Thats why i assumed the new 3,9ghz i3 with hyperthreadding could be a good cpu for arma

[schadler17 36]

I'm planning on upgrading my CPU/MOBO/RAM here soon, thats why I'm asking. Solely for the purpose of playing Arma 3, as any other games I play don't require nearly as much CPU/GPU power as Arma, and anything that does, my GPU can take the load.

 

Right now, I'm on an AMD A10-5800k APU OC'd at 4.3ghz, 8gb ram, AMD Raedon 7750 GPU 1gb and 240gb SSD, pulling about 20-25 FPS from arma 3 on script/mod-heavy servers. Sometimes I can get more, based on which servers I play, but I really only play one unless its late-hours where the servers I normally play on are empty.

[ceeeb 147]

My question is, which cpu will bring the highest fps in a multiplayer environment that is both script heavy and also modded? People say single threaded processors are the way to go, which by the link below would suggest the I7 4790k.

 

 

My understanding is in Arma 3 multiplayer, FPS is often limited by the server. If the server is struggling and running low FPS, all connected users will have also have bad FPS. So long as the user FPS is being dictated by the server FPS, any CPU capable of matching that FPS will give the exact same FPS.

The best way to improve multiplayer FPS is to play on a more powerful server, play better and/or simpler missions, or if you have the money help build or rent a decent server box.

 

 

Hopefully the Arma engine will one day change, so user FPS is completely independent of the server, as with almost every other game out there....

 

 

See http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=1264, http://forums.bistudio.com/topic/138999-low-cpu-utilization-low-fps/

[domokun 515]

Skylakes improvement over haswell unlocked i7 is ~8%... But if you want to believe what some internetsites say that merely reflect what intel claims and uses calculated benchmarks then you are free to do so...

The site that you dismissed as "more like the marketing numbers" concludes with "En pratique on en est loin puisque le gain est à fréquence égale atteint à peine les 10%".

Which means "in practice the gains scarcely reach 10%".

So what are we supposed to be believing again?

[St. Jimmy 272]

As the ceeeb's link shows, Broadwell and Skylake are the fastest ones currently. There's likely bit more than the pure raw core power like L1, 2, 3 caches and so on that affects the performance. Skylake can catch Broadwell when OC'd and Skylake can take faster memory so it can get past very likely.

 

That Broadwell shows that Intel got potential for improvement over the Skylake because Broadwell uses DDR3L memory and if it could take faster memory it would be 10-15% what it currently is and it's running 0,5GHz lower clocks which is another 10-15% if it can be OCd like Skylake. But for those reasons it''s in par with Skylake and bit worse when OCd if both CPUs are pushed to the limit.