Choosing a Gaming CPU at 1440p: Adding in Haswell
by Ian Cutress on June 4, 2013 10:00 AM ESTSleeping Dogs
While not necessarily a game on everybody’s lips, Sleeping Dogs is a strenuous game with a pretty hardcore benchmark that scales well with additional GPU power. The team over at Adrenaline.com.br are supreme for making an easy to use benchmark GUI, allowing a numpty like me to charge ahead with a set of four 1440p runs with maximum graphical settings.
One 7970
Sleeping Dogs seems to tax the CPU so little that the only CPU that falls behind by the smallest of margins is an E6400 (and the G465 which would not run the benchmark). Intel visually takes all the top spots, but AMD is all in the mix with less than 0.5 FPS splitting an X2-555 BE and an i7-3770K.
Two 7970s
A split starts to develop between Intel and AMD again, although you would be hard pressed to choose between the CPUs as everything above an i3-3225 scores 50-56 FPS. The X2-555 BE unfortunately drops off, suggesting that Sleeping Dogs is a fan of the cores and this little CPU is a lacking.
Three 7970s
At three GPUs the gap is there, with the best Intel processors over 10% ahead of the best AMD. Neither PCIe lane allocation or memory seems to be playing a part, just a case of threads then single thread performance.
Four 7970s
Despite our Beast machine having double the threads, an i7-3960X in PCIe 3.0 mode takes top spot.
It is worth noting the scaling in Sleeping Dogs. The i7-3960X moved from 28.2 -> 56.23 -> 80.85 -> 101.15 FPS, achieving +71% increase of a single card moving from 3 to 4. This speaks of a well written game more than anything.
One 580
There is almost nothing to separate every CPU when using a single GTX 580.
Two 580s
Same thing with two GTX 580s – even an X2-555 BE is within 1 FPS (3%) of an i7-3960X.
Sleeping Dogs Conclusion
Due to the successful scaling and GPU limited nature of Sleeping Dogs, almost any CPU you throw at it will get the same result. When you move into three GPUs or more territory, it seems that having the single thread CPU speed of an Intel processor gets a few more FPS at the end of the day.
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jabber - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
4.6 million on Steam? Is that basically the current total subscriber level?Wow I knew gamers were a minority but that's scary. Okay I know not all gamers are on Steam but...
Amazed that companies even bother for so few. Say it isn't so!
jeffkibuule - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Pretty sure that's current ACTIVE users.jabber - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
I'd hope so.chizow - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Yeah it has to be, a few years ago Steam had announced they have some 25 million users, it was actually very close to the individual numbers for 360 and PS3 at the time. Valve keeps their total #s and sales really close to the vest though, so it's hard to get numbers out of them unless they are announcing milestones.Rattlepiece - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
4.6 million was the current amount of users online when the article was written. http://store.steampowered.com/stats/Steam has more than 55 million active users.
medi02 - Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - link
I wonder what they mean by "active".Most likely it's a number of users with steam client running.
Well, it runs idle for more than a year for me, yet I'm an "active" user I guess...
UltraTech79 - Saturday, June 22, 2013 - link
Why the hell are you running steam idle for over a year and not using it then?FlushedBubblyJock - Monday, April 6, 2015 - link
Worse than that, he shows the rez stats, and we have 30% at 1080p, and less than 5% at higher rez, and yet he totally ignores and blows off the 65% that are below 1080p.He pretends they don't even exist. Must be tough looking so far down the nose at what you'd prefer not to see or notice.
Amazing "accuracy" as usual, as he immediately rambles off into his personal fantasy about multiple screens "gaining"...
R O F L
Please apply for politics or news.
trajan2448 - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
Still publishing Crossfire numbers as legit, despite multiple sites showing numerous runt frames which never reach the screen? This is disingenuous, to say the least.dsumanik - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
What's more disengenuous is the haswell review. Glowing review of an incremental more of the same from intel.This article actually recommends a 2500 k.
That says it all!