Amounts of cores: does having more matter?

Through research, I have found that people have explained that higher clock speeds matter more in Beam rather than having more cores. As I may be buying soon...would I be smarter in looking for a processor (it will be AMD) with less cores but a higher clock speed (4.0GHz +)?

Intel fanboys, do. not. harp. on. me.

 

with beamng you need a higher speed but since it runs on one vehicle per core, if you want to run lots of vehicles (4+), you will need more cores that run at high speeds, the perfect answer would be a new intel 6 core or even the 5860x and overclocking, another choice is the i7-4790k, which has a stock turbo of 4.4GHz and the hyper threading gives it about and extra 3 cores that will make Beamng run more vehicles.


Hope this helped.

 

Should've mentioned:

Cpu budget = $100 +/- $25

and overclocking has been planned for about a year m8 ^

 

If you're playing Beam, go Intel.
BeamNG requires as much single-threaded performance as possible, but clock speeds != performance. You're better off with a 3.6 GHz i3 than a 4.2 GHz AMD FX.

More cores will allow you to run more vehicles simultaneously without any significant performance loss, however.

 

I don't understand something here,

how can an intel processor @ 3.6 GHz outperform an AMD processor at 4.2GHz (this may get more technical than I expected)

 

I've already written a megapost on the subject.

Clock speeds mean fuck all when comparing 2 chips of different architectures. With the same frequency clock signal fed into it, an Intel Haswell chip is alot faster than an AMD FX chip.

I'd write yet another explanation, but not in the mood today, look back through my posts and maybe you'll find it, maybe you won't.

 

Because IPC. Look it up.

AMD's Bulldozer architecture was far from impressive even at launch, and so AMD's solution was to pack as many cores onto a chip in order to compensate for the single-threaded performance shortcomings.

Anyway, AMD is value for the money, and lots o' cores, but the difference Haswell makes in BeamNG and a few other CPU heavy games is most certainly noticeable. I, myself, would reccomend a Haswell Intel, even if you go for a Pentium or i3, the socket (LGA1150) is shared with higher end chips like the i5 4690k and i7 4790k. AM3+ is pretty much over, and the best chip for that socket is the FX 9370, which, overclocked, begins to compete with i5 in most applications.

Keep in mind, most programs/games aren't ready to use more than 4 cores, but in the end it's your decision.

EDIT:

Diamondback made this CPU analyzer for BeamNG, and here are results:

 

Very helpful information guys,

thanks!

 

I've been wondering, is physical cores better that virtual? so If I have 4 physical cores, and then a different one has 2 physical but two virtual are within one physical?

which would be better?

 

On Intel. Physical wins always.

AMD does not have hyperthreading though. It only has physical cores, however 2 and cores share various resources which can cause slowdowns in multithreaded applications vs Intel's purely standalone cores. Intel's hyperthreaded (or virtual) cores also experience this slow down.

An Intel core has a floating point unit. An amd processor has to have 2 cores sharing 1 floating point unit between them, therefore if a program on each core both need to use the floating point unit, you get a stall in one program as it waits for the other to finish using the fpu and it can take its turn after. Intel physical cores don't have this problem, each core has its own fpu, no taking turns required. Intel hyperthreading returns this problem again, you treat 1 physical core as 2 virtual cores, suddenly you are back at square 1 with a shared FPU between 2 "cores".


Usually anything virtual within computing is inferior to its true counterpart. Virtual Machines for example, far slower than the true hardware machine.

 

People have said this in this thread already: Get intel. Just today, I ditched my AMd fx 8320 for an i7 5820k, and let me tell you: the difference is astounding.

Take a quick look at those two scores. One with the 8320, and one with the 5820k. All of the difference comes from the physics, which intel can do much better. While the benchmark is just numbers, let me tell you the sort of performance differences I experienced.

With my 8320, my experience was mediocre at best. I would average about 50 fps with the d series, covet and occasionally the grand marshall. The moonhawk was probably around 35-40, and the h series with the uplift was about the same. I couldn't play the sunburst at all because whenever I got up to speeds, my fps would always drop to 20. the t series idled at 17 fps. There were also a lot of frame rate fluctuations. Whenever I'd go over a bridge in east coast, regardless of my car, I'd drop to 17 fps. Crashes, and suspension bouncing would eat away about 5-10 frames. Crashes dropped to 30. So on and so forth.

Come the 5820k. I've played a few hours, and I haven't seen any problems. with the exception of the t series, all vehicles run 100% of the time at a cool 60 fps. The t series runs at about 25 fps, which is better then the 17 I got with AMD, but its not much better. I've still yet to give overclocking a go, so I'll see what I can do with overclocking.

Please, for the love of all that is good in this world, get intel. I seriously regret getting an AMD processor back when I built my pc. Even if you can't afford a top of the line i7 or i5, at least you'll get the proper socket which will allow you to upgrade later on.

 

To be fair, the i7-5820K is nearly three times more expensive than the FX-8320. For that money you'll get an i3-4160.