Conclusion

Last summer we published a similar series of articles, where we were analyzing gaming performance on the basis of two different processors. Back in the days it became very clear that performance differences between two CPU's at high resolutions are close to zero. The reason for this can be found within the fact, that the processor isn't the bottleneck of a system, when you're playing games at high resolutions. In this case it's the graphics card, which has to work overtime. In case of lower resolutions the influence of the processor becomes clearly visible, since the graphics card isn't the limiting factor anymore.

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing eight different games and two different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the AMD FX-4170, with our "low-preset" is on average 45.7 percent slower than the Core i7-4770K. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the AMD FX-4170 become 10.6 percent slower than the Core i7-4770K's. Especially at lower resolutions with low details, when the graphics card isn't the bottleneck in the system, it's clearly visible, that the AMD CPU is quite a bit slower. Overclocking the Core i7-4770K to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 11 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 1 percent. Regarding the AMD FX-4170 the situation is a bit different: 3.7 percent gain with "low-preset" and 2.0 percent with "high-preset". What's quite interesting to see is how the wattage of our test system increased while maintaining 4.5 GHz stably. The 4770K needed 40 percent more power and in case of the FX-4170 the increase was 25 percent.

If you bought a AMD FX-4170 a while back, you see, that there is quite a gap between this CPU and the i7-4770K, when the VGA isn't the bottleneck in a system. As soon as the graphics card starts limiting, then the difference between the two CPU are small and not significant. On the other hand there is the price of these two chips, where the one from Intel costs more than 2.5 times as much as the AMD processor.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Far Cry 3
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2