Risen - Graphics Card Benchtest @ PCGH

JemyM said:

I have one of those. They aren't that expensive, are they?

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No, The i7-920 (which I have) is cheaper than some of the (admittedly high level) Core2 Quad processors.

Somewhere between a GTX 275 and GTX 285 GPU card. (here in .. my country)

booboo said:

well, things seldom scale linearly - I'd still like to see performance numbers for the CPUs that most of the market is likely to have. I interpreted 'cpu-bound' to mean that the CPU is doing serious work during the rendering process (or at least the game loop)

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You are of course right that we can't really know until we see some CPU benchmarks (or better yet - hold a copy of the game in our hands ) - however, it should be possible to predict performance with a certain degree of accuracy from this GPU test.

First of all, in a rasterized game (like all modern games) the CPU cost of rendering a certain game frame only depends on the number of batches (number of objects drawn, to put it simply) as well as the number of render state changes needed to draw these batches. Pixel resolution, material quality, number of vertices and number of triangles only affects GPU performance.

If a game is CPU-bound it means that the CPU cannot process game logic and send the batches of graphics fast enough to keep the GPU busy. If a game is GPU-bound it means that the graphics card cannot process the render commands that are being sent to it fast enough.

You can see if a game is CPU-bound if changing resolution makes no difference whatsoever to performance (for example, just guessing from my part, try an older 3d game like Quake3 and use Fraps to see FPS in 1024x768 and 1600x1200). On the other hand, a game is GPU bound if performance changes drastically with resolution, shadows etc - even when nothing major is going on. Try NWN2 in a small location, like an inn..

A game can only run as fast as the weakest component - so since this report shows that the Radeon 5870 runs Risen at 60.6fps we can deduct that the i7 is *at least* powerful enough to render the game at 60fps. Actually, since we see a performance drop even on that graphics card when going from 1280x1024 to just 1680x1050, one could speculate that the game is indeed entirely GPU-bound.

From that I would expect that the 8800GTX is the limiting factor by far in this test, so the performance numbers listed for that card is probably fairly accurate for weaker CPUs as well.

But again, all this is just speculations - although speculations that I believe I have fairly sound arguments for (not to mention quite a lot of hands-on experience in the field)

Last week I bought a new system. Core2Duo 7500 2,95 ghz, 4 gb ram, 1 gb gts250. It can run Witcher, Mass Effect, Sacred 2, Drakensang with full detail without a sweat. But, I think Risen is going to stress it a bit. It seems pretty demanding game according to the tests.

When Gothic 2 was released in 2002, I remember it was also a CPU-bound game. Without a fast CPU (for its time of course) G2 fell to a creeping pace in towns. I think Risen follows its grandfather's steps.

Some things never change.

I'm running the game on a Core 2 8400, 4 Gb RAM and an Nvidia 8800 GT. Runs silky smooth with everything maxed...

booboo said:

They seem to be using a i7 quad-core (effectively 8 threads of execution!) as a benchmark system - how useful is that?

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According to the review at WoR it is not useful at all. The game uses one core at 100%+ all the time and only a second core does yield a tangible performance boost. Anything beyond that (three or four cores) doesn't seem to matter.
That's why it is preferable (at least for playing Risen) to have more "raw power" than fancier tech or more cores. A Core 2 Duo E8500/E8600 will very likely outperform most newer i5/i7 CPUs due to their higher clock.

ikbenrichard said:

Well 200 euros…. you can get a decent GPU en CPU for that money. We are not all addictive/rich

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Probably more then 200 considering a mobo would need to be upgraded. i7's use either LGA 1156 or LGA 1366 sockets while Core 2 Duo's and Quads use LGA 775. I think Old Pentiums used something even older. So getting the new processor means getting new motherboard... and possibly memory.

hiciacit said:

I'm running the game on a Core 2 8400, 4 Gb RAM and an Nvidia 8800 GT. Runs silky smooth with everything maxed…

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That's good to hear, I'm running a similar setup right now. Core 2 6700, 4GB RAM, 8800 GTS 512 - on XP SP3

Yes, I appreciate that you need to remove bottlenecks when testing component performance - I'm just concerned that stating that the 'game is CPU-bound' and then using a kick-ass CPU (which 99% of PC owners do not have) kind of weakens any subsequent statements they make about general FPS performance. I have done enough investigation in my time to realize than nasty dependencies/timing/synchronization issues etc can surface when perf characteristics change and render any extrapolation pretty dicey.

Still, it sounds like I may have overemphasized the multi-core dependency - that's what you get for going on hearsay ;-) I'm relieved to hear that it seems to run well on a CPU/GPU combo similar to my own - should be getting it on Friday (yay!)

As for cost of i7 (and decent new socket 1156 mobo) ~ ZAR 5,000+ ~ $700USD (at least). Yes, we get screwed over by massive import tariffs etc in this country. I used to have a friend 'smuggle' in a new card from the US every two years or so, but alas he has now moved to Seattle (to work for the Evil Empire)…That pretty much halved the cost I would pay if I bought it locally! You guys don't know how good you have it ;-)

runs @ 30-45 FPS on e8400 @ 4.1GHz, 4870x2, 4GB RAM, Win7 x86.. everything maxed 1920x1080.. a bit lower than i would have expected but its playable its not stuttering every 20-30 seconds like Gothic3 which is nice.. loading is extremely fast, like 2-3 seconds on my SSD raid0 disks, much faster than Gothic3 from what i remember.

When I bought core i7 + mobo it wasnt all that much more expensive than vanilla quadcore + mobo. The extra was mainly for the mobo that was much more feature rich. Core i7 didnt have budget mobos then.

As for gaming performance it isnt all that much better than vanilla quad. There is som but the real benefit is elsewhere like intelligent power use and other smart stuff. The eight threads make windows run smooth too.

Right now is not a good time to upgrade imo, especially for graphics cards. Anyone who is looking to upgrade, but doesn't necessarily need to do it immediately, should wait a few more months until nVidia releases their GTX 300 series. Not only will there be more to choose from, but the ensuing price war will no doubt substantially lower the prices of the current lineup.