Hardware News

Nvidia GeForce 8000 Series CPU Scaling Performance

Patrick "MACMAC" MacMillan

2007-08-07 11:50:25.0


In every computer discussion board you find the following question: “I’m looking to upgrade, what graphics card is best suited to my system?” And inevitably, when dealing with an older or lower-end setup, you see this comment: “Your processor isn’t fast enough, it will bottleneck that modern graphics card.” What exactly is this bottleneck, and is it as bad as many people make it sound? Well Legion Hardware has just posted a terrific article detailing the CPU scaling performance of the Nvidia GeForce 8000 series.

Here is a brief extract from the article:

“The GeForce 8600 GTS and other graphics cards offering similar performance do not require a processor with much more guts than a Sempron 3600+ or Celeron 440. This was evident in all four games tested, particularly Company of Heroes. Today we still believe it is important to carefully pick the right graphics card and processor combination as it will make for a better all round gaming experience. We still believe graphics cards such as the GeForce 8600 GTS are best paired with E4300 and X2 4000+ processors or anything slower.”


It was interesting to note that processors with less than 2MB of L2 cache were severely bottlenecking the higher-end cards. This was particularly evident in Company of Heroes and X3: Reunion. In games based on the Jupiter EX engine, such as F.E.A.R, CPU performance was pretty much irrelevant. Conversely, in Far Cry, gaming performance was almost entirely dependent on the CPU speed.

Click here to read the full article.
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