INTRODUCTION
This article is a follow up to my previous article “CPU Bottleneck Analysis”. If you haven't already read that then I would recommend that you go over that to get a better understanding of this analysis. If you don’t wish to read the CPU Bottleneck analysis, you can still enjoy this article.
In my previous article I compared the performance of various benchmarks at various CPU frequencies to study the affect of CPU frequency on high resolution gaming. This was done on a pair of GTX 280’s overclocked to 720 / 1470 / 2480. The data that I gathered gave me raw numbers and I learned that in most titles the frame rates maxed out once my Intel QX 9650 CPU reached around 3.80 GHZ. After that increasing CPU speed did not have a major impact on the performance. Being able to know this was satisfactory in its own right but I decided to go one step further.
EXPLAINING CPU EFFICIENCY
We have often heard the term “sweet spot” and “ideal overclock” on forums and hardware website, but have we ever tried to find this mathematically? How would you quantify processor gaming efficiency. How would you go about finding the CPU efficiency? In reality there is no straight answer to it. Everyone is entitled to thinking of CPU efficiency the way they want to think. Some might say it is the CPU’s power usage per FPS delivered. Others might want to think of it as the cost / FPS. I however, like to think of it as FPS / GHZ. How many FPS am I seeing per CPU cycle.
With this idea in mind, I divided the number of FPS that I got at a particular CPU frequency by the CPU frequency (GHZ) and called that number the CPU Efficiency (measured in FPS/GHZ). This way I can know exactly how much bang am I getting for my buck at a particular setting. The results are quite interesting.
RESULTS
I will first show some titles which work as well at lower CPU frequencies as they do at higher. Obviously, this means that the CPU is more efficient at low frequencies. In other words when looking at a graph, the highest point in your graph will be your sweet spot. (One could argue that the spot might not be so “sweet” if your FPS is not over 60; but let’s not go there. I am not taking that into consideration since most of the titles that I tested are anyway above 60 FPS average. )
SO I will start off with titles where the CPU is most efficient at the stock 3.0 setting and then move up from there.
CALL OF JUAREZ DX 10 DEMO
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