Intel or AMD? Since the arrival of Intel's Core 2 Duo processors, AMD has struggled to remain competitive, remaining in the game by offering its higher-tier parts at very competitive prices. In recent years it has bet the farm on multi-core performance - its latest flagship, the FX-8350, offers eight cores at 4.0GHz with no overclocking restrictions, while its Intel competitor - the Core i5 3570K - offers four cores at 3.4GHz. In a world where single-core performance still dominates, the Intel offering is still considered the better buy - it's certainly more power-efficient and has more overclocking potential.
We approached a number of developers on and off the record - each of whom has helped to ship multi-million-selling, triple-A titles - asking them whether an Intel or AMD processor offers the best way to future-proof a games PC built in the here and now. Bearing in mind the historical dominance Intel has enjoyed, the results are intriguing - all of them opted for the FX-8350 over the current default enthusiast's choice, the Core i5 3570K.
Perhaps it's not entirely surprising - Crytek's Crysis 3 is a forward-looking game in many ways, and as these CPU tests by respected German site PC Games Hardware demonstrate, not only does the FX-8350 outperform the i5, it also offers up an additional, minor margin of extra performance over the much more expensive Core i7 3770K - a processor that's around £100 more expensive than the AMD chip. Only the six-core Intel Core i7 3930K - a £480 processor - beats it comprehensively.
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A comparison of Epic's Elemental demo running on PS4 and the year-old version running on a Core i7 PC with GTX 680. We should expect many of the launch next-gen titles to be PC ports, rather than games designed to get the most out of the new console architecture.
It's a surprising state of affairs bearing in mind how modern games development typically works. In recent times, parallelising code over multiple cores has taken priority. It's the best way to get the same code working on Xbox 360 (three cores, six hardware threads), PS3 (six SPUs, one core, two hardware threads) and PC (anything from two to eight cores). Tasks are allocated as "job queues" that are spread out over whatever processing elements are available, and they are executed in parallel. Now, PlayStation 4 may well have eight cores, but they're running at just 1.6GHz. A Core i5 not only has massively superior single-thread performance, but it's also running at over twice the speed. The FX-8350 offers not only the same core count as PS4 but also a similarly impressive boost to clock speed. So in theory, chips from both vendors should easily outperform the next-gen consoles, but AMD has the potential to offer more performance at the same price-point - as Avalanche Studios' Chief Technical Office, Linus Blomberg, tells us.
"I'd go for the FX-8350, for two reasons. Firstly, it's the same hardware vendor as PS4 and there are always some compatibility issues that devs will have to work around (particularly in SIMD coding), potentially leading to an inferior implementation on other systems - not very likely a big problem in practice though," he says.
"Secondly, not every game engine is job-queue based, even though the Avalanche Engine is, some games are designed around an assumption of available hardware threads. The FX-8350 will clearly be much more powerful [than PS4] in raw processing power considering the superior clock speed, but in terms of architecture it can be a benefit to have the same number of cores so that an identical frame layout can be guaranteed."
In the here and now, games that favour AMD like Crysis 3 are the exception and not the rule. Intel is demonstrably the better choice for the current generation of games as pretty much every CPU review over the last several years demonstrates. However, bearing in mind how well established parallelisation is, it's surprising that AMD hasn't enjoyed more success. One source, who chooses to remain anonymous, tells us that the disparate architectures found in the current-gen consoles are partly responsible for this.
"Getting a common game architecture to run across both [Xbox 360 and PS3] is no easy feat and you have to take 'lowest common denominator' sometimes. This can mean that your engine, which is supposed to be 'wide' (ie. runs in parallel across many cores) ends up having bottlenecks where it can only run on a single core for part of the frame," he says.
A matter of RAM
Next-gen consoles adopt 8GB of unified memory as a baseline. In contrast, PC operates two distinct pools - system memory (DDR3) and video RAM (typically, GDDR5). Our advice for graphics is to get a card with as much GDDR5 as you can, but system memory also has to be factored in.
Linus Blomberg of Avalanche recommends 8GB of DDR3, while another of our sources believes that 12GB is a safer bet for future-proofing your PC, bearing in mind the overhead required by Windows combined with the fact that graphics data needs to spool from system RAM into the GPU's onboard memory.
1600MHz DDR3 currently offers the best mixture of value and performance. Most motherboards accept four modules - our recommendation would be 2x 4GB to begin with, adding additional modules into the spare slots if RAM does prove to be an issue.
"This usually isn't an issue, except when you come to scaling up to PC architecture. If your engine works in a certain way then running more in parallel helps for part of the frame, but you still get stuck on the bottlenecks. This is why, I think, that most games that are 'ported' to PC work better with fewer more powerful cores, like the i5. The single-threaded grunt is enough to get you through the bottlenecks and drive a faster frame-rate."
Crysis 3 - here benchmarked on a GeForce Titan and a GTX 680 using a six-core i7 overclocked to 4.8GHz. V-sync is disabled here to maximise GPU output - as soon as a frame is ready it is displayed on-screen. It's interesting to note that the fact that the Titan has 3x the RAM of the 680 doesn't seem to make any difference, even with the level of detail seen in this richest of games. It'll take time for devs to truly make the most of the huge amount of memory next-gen consoles offer.
The same source also sees AMD as a better long term bet than Intel:
"This (Sony) approach of more cores, lower clock, but out-of-order execution will alter the game engine design to be more parallel. If games want to get the most from the chips then they have to go 'wide'... they cannot rely on a powerful single-threaded CPU to run the game as first-gen PS3 and Xbox 360 games did. So, I would probably go for the AMD as well, as this might better match a console port of a game... based on what we know so far."
Engines like Frostbite 2/3 and CryEngine 3 are built with the future in mind - they are tailored towards getting the most out of PC in the present, with the developers knowing that the investment here will directly transition across to next-gen console development. It's a trend we're likely to see becoming more prevalent as x86 processors become the standard across all major triple-A platforms.
There are reasons to stick with Intel, of course. Power efficiency is markedly improved, you can overclock virtually any Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge chip to 4.2GHz (and perhaps beyond) very easily, plus you will get that performance boost in older games over the AMD architecture. But it's worth bearing in mind that there's no upgrade path with the current socket 1155 boards used to run mainstream Intel processors (a new 1150 standard arrives with the Haswell architecture in the summer), while it's believed that the current AMD AM3+ socket standard is good for at least one more CPU generation.
For existing PC owners suddenly looking to jump ship from Intel to AMD, pause for a moment - of all the components, CPU power is probably the least of the concerns the PC platform has, compared to the PlayStation 4 at least. After all, the AMD Jaguar cores in the next-gen consoles were designed to compete with Intel's low-power Atom architecture, created with tablets and low-power laptops in mind. Even with eight of them, today's quad-core and octo-core desktop processors outright own them in terms of processing power. What really sets PlayStation 4 apart from PC is graphics power and bandwidth across the system - the amounts of data that flow freely between the major processing elements.
