The New Intel Core™ i7 and Simulations

[TX-EcoDragon]

SimHQ took at a look at the new Intel Core i7 tech in a few sims - while their resolutions used for "High" evaluations are way to low to be of much use, the results are still interesting.

http://www.simhq.com/_technology2/technology_111a.html

In FSX we don't see any compelling reason to dump Core 2 tech for the Core i7:


Though the i7 is showing some promise in IL-2 - I wish I could see if this trend continues to higher resolutions:


It's nothing special in COD4:


Same for GTR2:


If World in Conflict is your thing you might wanna look at taking the plunge though:


In the end, these tests are at too low of a resolution to mean anything to me, a lot can change between 1280x and 1920x resolutions. Based on their results though, I see no reason to spend far more money on an i7 build, when Core2 is still a solid performer and a much more affordable build. . .especially given DDR2 vs DDR3 ram prices, the premium prcing on i7 motherboards, and fairly pricey CPUs. I still have yet to run any title that is more demanding to my CPU than FSX is, so it remains the benchmark to watch for me.  Black shark seems to like a strong CPU as well as strong GPU. . .based on the performance difference Vista users are seeing going form one to two cores of CPU affinity there might be some promise for the i7 there too (but I have to wonder why no boost is seen in XP when doing the same thing. . .that suggests something other than pure CPU power is blame, and that it's being limited by software architechture.)

See the Review here:
http://www.simhq.com/_technology2/technology_111a.html

[TX-Gunslinger]

As I've eluded to (probably too many times) on comms, threaded applications require substantial discipline and skill to develop.  The skill in managing threaded applications I truely believe is past most game software producers, managers and coders.

There is a myth that exists that the best code writers work for the big gaming houses.  In my experience, this is not true.  I've seen software engineers hired from major gaming houses with great resumes and work on best selling titles that could not even begin to develop the tightly structured code design required for threaded applications (which is the meat and potatoes of my work).

The 920 in particular (the only affordable chip) is a real dog in these tests, but most importantly - it just costs too much and carries too much costly baggage.

I think Eco, that your selection strategy which considers cost/performance is much cheaper over the long term and probably enables you to stay at a higher level of end performance year-to-year.  It's your strategy and approach that's worth adopting.

S~

Gunny