Will my PC Run this? What CPU/GPU to get? What settings? System Specifications.

[Leon86 13]

If it's just for gaming I'd get a 2500K. Hyperthreading has never been worth it for gaming and I dont think it will be.

[bangtail 0]

If it's just for gaming I'd get a 2500K. Hyperthreading has never been worth it for gaming and I dont think it will be.

I'll agree, not many games make use of it yet, but I'm guessing a large majority of the ArmA community will be playing BF3 and Frostbite 2 makes use of 8 cores. The Quad core's days as the optimal choice for gaming are numbered.

Edited September 30, 2011 by BangTail

[PuFu 4600]

I'll agree, not many games make use of it yet, but I'm guessing a large majority of the ArmA community will be playing BF3 and Frostbite 2 makes use of 8 cores. The Quad core's days as the optimal choice for gaming are numbered.

can you post a link about it. I have yet to see any game take advantage of either my quad i7 2600k or the six 970 (only 3d software and composing ones + UDK)

Edited September 30, 2011 by PuFu

[bangtail 0]

The Frostbite 2 engine can use up to 8 cores and with BF3, it will do just that.

There will be two versions of the Frostbite Engine: Version 1.x is used for Battlefield: Bad Company 1, Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. It supports Xbox 360, PS3 and DirectX 10. DICE is working on the Frostbite 2 engine at the moment that will support DirectX 10.1 and DirectX 11 as well. DICE is very proud of the parallelized engine since 2-8 parallel threads are supported for using full capacity of a Core i7 e.g.."

There are games that do take advantage of HT now, GTA IV being one and I believe Metro is another.

PCGH: By now multi-core CPUs have become very popular and the number of players with such machines is rapidly increasing. Did you integrate multi-core support into the engine from the beginning?

Oles Shishkovstov: Yes, the engine was architected to be multi-threaded from the start. That's the only sensible route to go. You just cannot add multi-threading later in the development cycle or it will be horribly sub-optimal.

PCGH: How many core are supported and what is the expected performance gain from 2, 4 or even 8 cores?

Oles Shishkovstov: We support at least two cores, and up to whatever count you have. You should expect linear scaling with the number of cores, when you aren't GPU limited.

We'll probably still have to wait to see widespread adoption but the fact that a big franchise like BF3 has gone in that direction will no doubt encourage other developers to follow suit.

Edited October 2, 2011 by BangTail

[Leon86 13]

Well battlefield 3 isnt going to run slower because of hypertheading but the only thing I can find is a benchmark of the alpha where an i5-760 runs identical to an i7-930

I have the bf3 beta installed and I'm gpu limited on 1920x1200 with everything on low. I run gtx260 in sli. Framerate is 70 in most areas, 130 if I look at the sky and under 45 in some places in the metro tunnel. Lowering res to 720p makes fps go to 60+ in the metrotunnels and gameplay is super smooth allround. Cpu is i5-750 on 4.0

[bangtail 0]

Well, you keep implying that 4 cores is the end of the line as far as CPU usage in gaming is concerned and I can assure you that this simply isn't the case.

I've been very clear in my assertion that there is still a ways to go but developers are slowly adopting 'parallelized' engines and they will become more and more relevant in the months to come.

Edited September 30, 2011 by BangTail

[Leon86 13]

Well I've never seen hypertheading make a difference in a game, as the i7 is 50% more expensive I always recommend the i5.

Sixcores already work in bad company 2 but the current sixcores do not perform as wel as sandy bridge quads.

[bangtail 0]

Firstly, BC2 isn't Frostbite 2 (it's Frostbite 1.5).

Secondly, I've definitely seen slight advantages with my 6 cores, but as I have maintained all along, there are very few games that take advantage of it at present.

I might also point out that it isn't purely about FPS. There are many other factors that contribute to the overall experience that benefit from multiple cores.

My overall objection lies with you making statements like 'Hyperthreading has never been worth it for gaming and I dont think it will be' which is quite simply not true.

It wasn't that long ago that only a few games supported Quad core CPUs.

It will be interesting to see what the 3960x (SB-E 6 core) will do with the Frostbite 2 engine :)

Edited October 1, 2011 by BangTail

[PuFu 4600]

Sixcores already work in bad company 2 but the current sixcores do not perform as wel as sandy bridge quads.

I tend to dissagree. My i7 970 as well as my i7 2600k are both clocked @4Ghz. And while in A2/OA, i have a slightly better game experience with the sandy one, in BF3 it's the opposite. (the only difference is that one rig is 16GB and the other 24GB). I used the same GFX card (6970) for testing

[lozz08 10]

Watching your CPU usage while playing BF3 is beautiful. Each core loaded very evenly. Never seen such good threading in a game, and I think BF3 will scale up to 8 cores pretty nicely.

[TombstoneTwo 10]

how would this rig stack up to bf3 as well as arma in general?

Intel X58 Core i7 Configurator

1 x Processor ( Intel® Core™ i7 960 Processor (4x 3.20GHz/8MB L3 Cache) )

0 x PowerDrive ( None )

1 x Processor Cooling ( Liquid CPU Cooling System [sOCKET-1366] - [Free Upgrade] Standard 120mm Fan )

1 x Memory ( 6 GB [2 GB X3] DDR3-1600 - Corsair or Major Brand )

1 x Video Card ( NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 - 1.5GB - Single Card )

1 x Video Card Brand ( === High Performance === EVGA Brand Video Card Powered by NVIDIA )

1 x Motherboard ( ASUS Sabertooth X58 )

1 x Motherboard USB / SATA Interface ( Motherboard default USB / SATA Interface )

1 x Power Supply ( 800 Watt -- Standard )

1 x Primary Hard Drive ( 1 TB HARD DRIVE -- 32M Cache, 7200 RPM, 6.0Gb/s - Single Drive )

0 x Data Hard Drive ( None )

1 x Optical Drive ( 24X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - Black )

0 x 2nd Optical Drive ( None )

0 x Flash Media Reader / Writer ( None )

0 x Meter Display ( None )

0 x USB Expansion ( None )

1 x Sound Card ( 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard )

1 x Network Card ( Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100) )

1 x Operating System ( Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium + Office Starter 2010 (Includes basic versions of Word and Excel) - 64-Bit )

[PuFu 4600]

High-ultra for BF3. High settings for A2. ot sure about A3 there.

I would much rather get a z68 board and an i7 2600k....

[bangtail 0]

Also, you might want to snag a 3GB 580. They aren't much more expensive and I've seen ArmA 2 go over 1.5GB even at 1080.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

Hi troops, I won a gtx 285 on ebay £70 :)but don't get it until next week, i have a 285 and I am going to sli them, at the moment i'm getting 35 fps at high settings on bench 1, has anyone got any clues to what ill see after i sli them.

What Bangtail said is pretty much on the money.

The second card makes a noticeable difference, however - you will immediately recognise if you are only running on one. :)

[Leon86 13]

a bulldozer test

Performance isnt that good for single threads, intel is still faster in superbly multithreaded stuff as well.

overclocked it has epic powerconsumption, so if you need a room-heater this might be the cpu to get.

[froggyluv 2135]

^^^

Ouch! At 4.8gh it fails to outperform a 2500k at 3.3 base :butbut:

I wonder if AMD can survive this -I really hope so as Intel needs the market competition.

Also,

Arma II: Operation Arrowhead is a notorious system hog, pushing CPUs, memory and graphics cards to their limit in the pursuit of ultra-realistic modern-day combat

Well they got the first part right :P

Edited October 12, 2011 by froggyluv

[bangtail 0]

AMD CPU fail again.

This is just another nail in AMD's coffin where CPUs are concerned.

Like you Froggy, I really hope they get their act together because we do need the competition.

[Leon86 13]

The strangest thing is performance is comparable to the x6 phenom II while die size isnt down that much, if they would've made a 8 core phenom II on the new process and it would've worked it'd be faster and smaller.

[PuFu 4600]

pretty disappointing, especially since they delayed released to push more out of it....

Even for someone like me living out of 3d work, where gaming comes second, the i7 (six and even quad) is a better investment

[bangtail 0]

I'm looking forward to SB-E (which is only a few weeks out now). It won't do much for gaming over the 980x (at least initially) but for productivity, it provides a nice boost.

I would have liked to have seen the 8 core SB-E now, but given AMD's lacklustre showing, I guess Intel feels there is no rush.

Edited October 12, 2011 by BangTail

[HR4 Elite 10]

It’s a sore subject GPU’s as I have come to learn, everyone quite rightly loves the one they have, until they change it of course, however I just wanted to put this down for any AMD Sapphire HD5850 2GB Toxic card owners, or infact any 5*** series 2gb owners.

Its regarding the over-clocking potential of this/these cards, there seems to be very little regards the OC'ing of these cards as they are locked when you first get them, but a couple of driver updates later and the newer Catalyst and they give you the tool to do it (of course once they give you the possibility to OC and you dabble, your warranty is gone, nevertheless)...

If anyone with this card searches on-line, as I did, to see what OC'ing is possible and finds very little info, and if you do there is no mention of the longer term outcome of the OC, then they may just come across this post..

AMD update card drivers often and very efficiently, these cards benefit greatly from keeping upto date with the current drivers.. You can and do see improved performance enhancements via the updates

So to the over-clock:

AMD’s Sapphire HD5850 2gb Toxic has stock clock speeds of 765Mhz on the core and 1125Mhz (4500Mhz effective) on the 2gb of Samsung GDDR5 Memory.

I over-clocked this just over 2mths ago using the in-built AMD Overdrive facility, the clock speeds I achieved then were 890Mhz on the core and 1295Mhz (increase to around 5000Mhz or so effective, I am assuming), I reduced the clocks just a little to be on the safe side.

This makes the HD5850 Toxic 2gb run to clock speeds similar to the HD6970 stock core of 880 but a little under the 6970’s stock memory of 1375Mhz. I have been assured that I can take the HD5850 Toxic to over 900Mhz on the core and into the mid 1300Mhz on the memory (GDDR5) if I use something like MSI Afterburner. At the moment I don’t want to do that as it runs great at the settings I have now, however might in the future just to see how far it will go.

So if you have one of these cards and are thinking of over-clocking it, then I would most definitely recommend it.

I have waited for a while before posting this to obviously make sure everything was running well, with no problems, which for just over 2mths it has done, temps on the card are at heavy load 64-69c and idle around 40c, auto fan runs between 25-45%, could manually speed up the fan if needed but there does not seem to be a need for it, also its still very quiet (VaporX) compared to some gpu’s..

So speed it up, over-clocking, of which I had very little knowledge can, or has in this case made a massive fps and performance improvement ..

Hope it may help anyone with the same card..

.

[Leon86 13]

Gpu overclocking is not as straightforward as cpu overclocking. Some games may still crash while furmark and other games run fine.

Overclocking the memory a lot will often decrease performance. gddr5 has error correction, if the clock is too high the memory will have many errors and correcting them makes the gpu have to do more work.

[HR4 Elite 10]

Gpu overclocking is not as straightforward as cpu overclocking. Some games may still crash while furmark and other games run fine.

Overclocking the memory a lot will often decrease performance. gddr5 has error correction, if the clock is too high the memory will have many errors and correcting them makes the gpu have to do more work.

Well I’m very happy to say not in this case, but I tend to only stick to the manufacturers utility tools provided, to alter anything to do with gpu or cpu..

But your points very valid, do whatever, but at your own risk..

.

[froggyluv 2135]

Hi, so I'm running a pair of 460's 1gb in SLI and am pretty happy with yet have alittle upgrade money now and was wondering if there's anything out there under $500 US worthwhile an upgrade.

Meaning I wouldn't mind getting a half of a future SLI system now if it's comparable to the 460 setup. 580gtx? Was thinking 570 but I think I'd like to get a little more Vram this time.

[Leon86 13]

Getting a single 580 will get you about the same performance you have now. But why get half a sli setup now if you can save up for a full one in a month or 2. By then maybe we'll know when the next gen of cards will be available.