CPU vs. graphics card
Now let’s get to the gaming part of the review and let the FX loose on the gaming world. However, what has bothered us for a long time is the fact that such tests are only ever done with pure high-end graphics cards – regardless of which segment a CPU actually comes from. That’s why we measured the selected games twice when big performance differences between the CPUs appeared: Once with a high-end card (Radeon R9 295X) and once with a smaller card (R9 270X or R9 285), whose performance was chosen so that you could somehow be happy with all CPUs.
We will not go further into points like minimum frame rate and frame time variations here – also because it has already been tested and described so often – as it would go beyond the scope of this small test. However, we made sure that the gaming experience remained satisfactory in every situation in our choice of benchmarks.
When does a graphics card start to limit?
DiRT 3 is a good example of how you can gain half the performance when you pair a faster CPU with a high-end card, or lose a third when you look at it the other way around:
Let’s now reach into the graphics card archive and look for a card that is ideally only as fast as the result of the FX 8370E with the VGA behemoth – and things look a bit more bearable. Here, the map is clearly limiting:
We are now playing the same game with Battlefield 4, even though we only measured a lag of about 30 percent in the single player when using the fastest map. First, the situation as we already know it:
However, an R9 285 is already enough for the single player to achieve a more or less equal score again! Thus, those who play offline with an FX-8370E can definitely keep up. However, in multi-player, which is difficult to benchmark, we would lower the lower limit, above which the graphics card becomes more of a limiting factor, to an R9 270 without an X.
Bioshock Infinite really doesn’t have the reputation of being a hardware killer, but the combination of a high-end graphics card and an FX-8370E doesn’t make much sense here either.
However, the principle “like goes with like” can already be confirmed with an R9 285, because the differences blur in the single-digit range except for a few FPS differences:
Playing at 3840 x 2160 pixels
We know that the graphics card is almost always the limiting factor for such resolutions. That’s why we let Tomb Raider run, because despite maximum settings, this console port actually runs quite smoothly on any better toaster. Despite the quite high frame rates, we hardly see a difference between the CPUs in the end. Here, it would actually almost not matter who does the base work – the graphics card shuts down as expected.
The FX-8370E is – with maximum concession and good will – a pure mid-range CPU. Conversely, this means that it only makes sense to use it if the relationship between CPU and graphics card performance is maintained and makes sense. Up to graphics cards like a Radeon R9 270X or R9 285 or a GeForce GTX 760 or GTX 660 Ti, you could be quite happy with the new FX processor – depending on the game. However, such a CPU solution would only be a block in the graphics card upper class (let alone the high-end segment); the balance is simply not right.
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