I'm a gamer and I haven't upgraded my CPU in 6 years

[c.f4]

only 250%

Only 250% is nothing if your 10 minute workload becomes 4 minutes.

Keep your Q6600 whilst I do a months worth of work in a few days

[oohms]

If i had been sensible in my hardware choices i should have stuck to a q6600 and something like an 8800GTX, and then upgraded the graphics card to a 4870x2 down the track.. would have saved me 5k at least, while still being able to play all my games well

[proffesso]

Originally Posted by c.f4

Only 250% is nothing if your 10 minute workload becomes 4 minutes.

Keep your Q6600 whilst I do a months worth of work in a few days

heh, my workload being rendering, usually in days / weeks at a time, 24/7 is quite heavy, dont worry luckily I can just add extra machines into the mix for linear speed increases. its the actual human/machine speed time that matters most for me.

but if your saying you can do a months work in a few days...thats far, far more than a 250% speed increase anyway

[Narcoticx2]

Originally Posted by oohms

If i had been sensible in my hardware choices i should have stuck to a q6600 and something like an 8800GTX, and then upgraded the graphics card to a 4870x2 down the track.. would have saved me 5k at least, while still being able to play all my games well

If i'd been sensible I'd be a few grand better off too. Nothing I do now my old c2d 3ghz/4gb/8800 system wouldn't handle. This is what I remember when I'm pondering whether or not to upgrade my gpu to a 7970m. Don't need it!

[NNNG]

Originally Posted by power

yeah i5 is pretty meh

i7 is where shit gets moving.

Not really. Quad core i7's just have HT. Not a huge difference unless you use HT where it's ~20% faster, max. The hex core i7's are a lot faster though.

[Daft_Munt]

Similar to the OP I havent upgraded my Q6600 since I got it, minus the GC. Why, I have found PC games to be all about bling and less about gameplay/fun and it is why I go back to old consoles for a quick bash at something. I also dont have the time and energy I used to be able to invest in a game. Elvis link showed that the hardcore gaming group doesnt make enough money for the publsihers to justify so many AAA games.

[TomJ]

Still rocking an E6750 clocked to 3.2Ghz on air and 4GB of DDR2 since early 2007.. LIKE A BAWS!

[nerdyfred07]

Depends on the games you play. I haven't been motivated to upgrade my PC since the games that I play can still be played really well in my standards. Dragon age series, witcher series, HON.

Since I dont get much time its also harder to justify an upgrade.

AMD x2 550 unlocked to quad and overclocked.
8gb ddr3, GTX 275, HD103SJ hdd.

SSD has been tempting, think a 60GB will be my next lol

[snappy1]

I have three gamers,

Q6600 @ 4 ghz air, 8 gb ram 780i with Ultra tri sli
W3550 @ 4.5ghz 12 gb ram RE3 with GTX 295 quad sli
3770k @ 4.8ghz 16gb ram Z77 with HD 5970 Quadfire

They can all play anything, but about 3-5 titles are starting to get too much for the old girl, in saying that throw an average new tiltle at it and it will still pump the fps

[chi]

holy shit, 8800 ultra in tri sli = super heater/power plant

[Foliage]

Originally Posted by nerdyfred07

SSD has been tempting, think a 60GB will be my next lol

Do it man, SSD will be like night and day, it makes such a massive improvement to everything you do on a PC, office work, interweb browsing, gaming, everything is faster.

[nerdyfred07]

Originally Posted by Foliage

Do it man, SSD will be like night and day, it makes such a massive improvement to everything you do on a PC, office work, interweb browsing, gaming, everything is faster.

yah man, wanna pick one off these forums tho lol. rare to see <120 GB SSD on sale around here. if it is, it always gets picked up fast! I dont game much other than HON so its no rush but cant wait!

[mevereyn]

Yep, far as I'm concerned, when I can be bothered to upgrade any damn thing for this PC (the HD5870 was the last thing...), it'll be an SSD, definitely. Using a few moderately fast hard drives atm, but I know the difference well enough - it'll be one hell of a jump in speed and convenience from where it's at right now.

[WishBone17]

Originally Posted by elvis

What you're probably seeing is a by-product of CPUs heading towards parallel growth (more cores, symmetric multi-processing, symmetric multi-threading), rather than the rampant serial growth (faster clock speeds) we saw for the previous decade.

Realtime 3D is notoriously difficult to calculate in parallel. As a result, game engines really are capped when it comes to CPU performance, due to their heavy reliance on the upper limits of clockspeed. Video cards can do a lot here, but at the end of the day video cards are still just final rasterisers, and the CPU is still a bottleneck for so much initial calculation.

I'm working for a film animation/VFXmob at the moment, which means "embarrassingly parallel" workloads. It's been the first time in about 7 years that I've set up a render farm. I have to say, it's a piece of cake these days, with every box holding a single 6 core CPU with hyper threading (giving me 12 virtual cores per box). Back when I started this gig, 1 box was 1 CPU, and farms were all about how much physical space and cooling you could buy to get enough CPUs crunching away. But these days, it's trivial to get a very powerful cluster up and running in minimal time.

So non-realtime 3D is loving this multi-core world we live in, but realtime 3D is suffering. What really needs to happen for realtime 3D is one of two things:

1) Advancements in software - new ways of calculating 3D that can better be split into parallel workloads on existing technology, or

2) Advancements in I/O, so that communication between CPUs is faster, as that's currently a massive bottleneck when trying to share information between CPUs (communication between CPUs is at least an order of magnitude slower than internal register access).

Not that any of this helps you decide what to do with your current rig, but that's all my take on it.

Wow that was very informative, great read.. My brother always says to me, I hope one day games will look like a pixar movie or shrek.. How long do you rekon we could play games that look like this, or is this just purely impossible?

[Jazper]

Originally Posted by WishBone17

Wow that was very informative, great read.. My brother always says to me, I hope one day games will look like a pixar movie or shrek.. How long do you rekon we could play games that look like this, or is this just purely impossible?

3 years. I read that every three years graphics become as good as the rendered 3d you see in cut scenes in previous gen games. IMO though, I don't think that consoles are to blame for lack if innovation in graphics.

I think we know where we want to get to but have no clear path to get to it.

The computer industry is due some consolidation time, massive growth is not going to continue at the previous rate of knots. Give it 5-10 years and there'll be another boom in technology.