The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion CPU Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 28, 2006 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
In many ways, the message this article sends is something we've already known: a fast GPU needs a fast CPU. The difference with Oblivion is that the impact of a slow CPU on a fast GPU is far more noticeable than on many games we've tested in the past. While we can't realistically provide a CPU scaling chart for every GPU we tested in the last review, you can draw some general conclusions based on the four GPUs we focused on in this review. If you're using an older Athlon 64 3000+ or 3200+ with anything around the speed of a Radeon X1800 XT or faster, you'll want to look at upgrading (or overclocking, naturally) your CPU; otherwise, you'll be leaving a decent amount of GPU performance on the table.
As we've continually seen during the past couple of years, AMD's Athlon 64 and X2 processors are the best of the best, but even within the family you'll still want to opt for something faster than an Athlon 64 3500+ in order to make good use of any high end GPU.
It's also important to look at the multi-core optimizations that Oblivion provides. The benefit of a dual core processor is definitely visible in Oblivion, and we welcome more games where there's a tangible real world performance improvement to multi-core processors. The difference isn't quite as large as what we've seen with Quake 4, but we're heading in the right direction.
Those lucky enough to have a high end CrossFire setup, for example with two X1900 XTs, will definitely want to invest in a high end Athlon 64 X2. Oblivion is quite possibly the first game we've tested where we can actually justify (and this is a stretch) an FX-60 and a pair of X1900 XTs, as they enable you to have much more than you get out of them in most games. As we stated in the beginning, you can also try hacking your configuration files and downloading some mods, improving performance in other ways. If you just want to set the detail sliders on Maximum and play the game at high resolutions, though, X1900 XT CF and a fast dual-core CPU will get the job done nicely. (Good luck convincing yourself or your significant other of that "need", though!)
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goku - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
It' really ticks me off that oblivion couldn't incorporate support for the new ageia physics processor. It would have been nice to see all those calculations being offloaded onto the PPU instead so that the CPU wouldn't have such an effect on performance.DigitalFreak - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Since they are using the Havock physics engine, it was never going to happen.DigitalFreak - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Oops, HavokMadellga - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
I don't think that was supposed to happen, but when I clicked on the link under the tittle:SMP - enhacing performance , it goes to http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2747">http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2747 , which is the same Oblivion CPU article we are reading.
I think the idea is to take us to the guide you are using, isn't it?
//s
kristof007 - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Same here. Please fix it Anand when you get a chance.JarredWalton - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Done. That page was my doing - Anand ran the tests, I wrote page 5. I forgot to paste in the link. (Actually, I ran into some issues with undo/redo and apparently lost the link in the process. I had to rewrite two paragraphs at the time.)Jarred Walton
Hardware Editor
AnandTech.com
shortylickens - Friday, April 28, 2006 - link
This makes me feel pretty good. I went out of my way to get the cheapest Socket 939 CPU I could find.Now that I've had the system for a while, I feel OK about doing one big CPU upgrade and I can actually see a performance boost.
bloc - Friday, April 28, 2006 - link
The sempron line is amd's answer to intels celeron line.Might it be possible to see the benches for the Sempron S754 as they're budget cpu's with huge overclocks?
kmmatney - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
A Sempron 2800+ overclocked to 2.4 GHz performs about the same as an Athlon 64 3700+ clocked at 2.2 GHz. So for a rough estimate, lower the Athlon64 speed by 10% to get the speed of a Sempron.My Sempron overclock at 2.45 Ghz was 100% stable for all games and applications I'd ever used until Oblivion. With Oblivion, the game was crashing until a lowered the spu speed to 2.35 GHz.
JarredWalton - Saturday, April 29, 2006 - link
Part of the problem is that there's only one SLI motherboard for socket 754, and honestly I think that's more of a novelty product than something truly useful. Anyone spending the money on multiple GPUs is better off buying a faster processor as well.Anyway, looking at how cache seems to affect performance of the other chips, I would guess that a Sempron 128K/256K would be equivalent to an Athlon 64 512K running 200 to 400 MHz slower. (i.e., Athlon 64 2.0 GHz -- 3200+ -- would probably be about equal to a Sempron 2.3-2.4 GHz.) Single channel memory plus a reduction in cache size should cause a moderate performance hit, clock for clock.
Of course, none of that means that Sempron chips aren't worth considering, especially with overclocking. Assuming you're not running super high end graphics configurations, though, you can probably reached the point where you're GPU limited to the same performance, whether you have an Athlon X2 or a Sempron.