gourimoko
Fighting the good fight!
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2008
- Messages
- 39,845
- Reaction score
- 53,645
- Points
- 148
Your problem is not your CPU. You should also NOT be hitting 100% utilization over 4 cores in BF3 for your CPU. I would test a clean installation and be sure.
Also, you can generally expect AMD CPUs to have high CPU utilization for a given task than Intel CPUs as they do less work per clock cycle over a smaller window of availability. Thus, mathematically, non-trivial tasks will generate a higher load per unit of time measured.
What this means in general is that the 'idle' task of the thread switcher has lower availability on an AMD system under load than on an Intel system, and this is predominantly due to the nature of the architectures as well as Intel's Hyperthreading CPU feature which the idle-task will count as an ((n+1)*core_count) increase in available threads of execution.
This means that one cannot compare CPU load metrics between hyperthreading CPUs and non-hyperthreading CPUs. This is a very important distinction.
The architecture benefit afforded to AMD by not using such a complex pipeline allows them to compensate for reduced work/cycle by having faster clocks and more (albeit less complex) cores.
But the tl;dr of it is CPU% is not an apples-to-apples comparison of workload across architectures.
Lastly, whoever told you BF3 was CPU bound lied to you.
BF3 uses 4 main threads of execution with several async threads firing from those various threads, however the overall performance requirements results in a nominal load on most quad-core CPUs.
To the point of CPU-bottleneck, it's simply NOT the case with respect to graphics output.
As you can see, on older architecture with only 2 cores, a loss of 8 Max FPS is noticed but the minimum frame rate drops to the mid-40s which would become a noticeable performance issue. This is due to an obvious CPU bottleneck (lack of available threads of execution), but is only evident in dual-core configurations.
With maximum settings (minus MSAA), the game performs almost equally on all quad-core or better architectures (with a few dual-cores tossed in). When MSAA is turned on, you would get a noticeable difference in performance, but this is a GPU issue only as MSAA is a shader process.
Therefore, again, your configurations simply aren't likely to be identical. Either you have different drivers, different operating systems, or there are other background programs running that are affecting your performance. But having an AMD CPU is not driving down your Battlefield 3 FPS.
