Processors: AMD FX 8370 versus Intel Core i7 5960X

Gears of War 4 is now a full DirectX 12 title, that means it has ASYNC compute options enabled. The driver overhead results as such should be much better (if properly implemented). In the past we have seen AMD perform much worse due to lower per core (IPC) performance these processors deliver. DirectX 12 can really help in this particular matter as CPU overhead can be cut off by a significant margin. As such we figured it'd be nice to compare inbetween two eigh-core processors (AMD FX 8370 versus Intel Core i7 5960X) both clocked at 4.3 GHz.

Above you can see the Intel Core i7 5960X (1199 USD) with its 8 cores and a total of 16 threads. Seven cores are utilized properly, three somewhat towards a bit and the rest is in idle.

Above you can see the AMD FX 8370 (199 USD) with its 8 cores and total of 8 threads. All eight cores are utilized properly.

We took four graphics cards to fire off at these two processors (and platforms). Two mid-range to high-end cards, and then two enthusiast class ones from both AMD and NVIDIA. Both setups wun Windows 10 64-bit all patched up, both setups run 16GB of memory. AMD has dual-channel 2133 MHz. The Intel platform is quad-channel 2400 MHz. Let's check out the differences scaled from 1080P up-to Ultra HD.





As you can see, with the Radeon RX 480 the differences are hardly measurable. We obviously do use a more GPU bound quality settings, but then again this is how you game at home. This already is impressive really as the FX 8370 is under 200 USD and the Core i7 5960X is a 1200 USD processor.

Once I replace the card with AMDs fastest kiddo, we see that the Radeon Fury X also behaves really well. We see a tiny drop off on 1080P which makes sense as the game is most CPU bound in the lowest resolution. But le's move towards two NVIDIA graphics cards.





We now insert the GeForce GTX 1060 (6GB) - You can see very similar behaviour to the RX 480 really, only a slight amount of drop in performance, hardly anything you'd notice really. DX12 is doing it's job well, removing API overhead, freeing up that processor and is heavily threading. Very nice.





The last graphics card is the Mc Daddy that is bound to show CPU bottlenecks due to it's massive horsepower, the Nvidia GeForce Titan X (Pascal) is way ahead of its time and priced 1300 USD alone. Up-to 2560x1440 you are fine. But sure at 1080P we finally run into CPU overhead. Honestly that is expected. Overall we can conclude though that up-to say a Radeon Fury X or GeForce GTX 1080 an AMD FX 8370 now is sufficient enough to run the game.