ASUS Republic of Gamers and X79 ROG Review – Rampage IV Gene, Formula and Extreme
by Ian Cutress on August 3, 2012 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
- Asus
- X79
- ROG
A Byword About 4-way 7970 Scaling on X79
With three different benchmarks, we can say a little bit about the scaling on certain games when using almost the best consumer performance system put together - an X79 platform and several 7970 GPUs. Numbers quoted here are whilst using the Rampage IV Extreme and i7-3960X at stock, and percentages are relevant to single card increases expected.
To start, Civilization V is not a good game to analyze for AMD. In order to keep consistency with our previous testing, we had to use Catalyst 12.3 drivers, which are a few months old now. As a result, with Civilization 5 we see no improvement on AMD moving from one card up to four, even at 2560x1440 and all the eye candy turned on.
Civilization V - One 7970: 78.73 FPS
Civilization V - Two 7970: 83.13 FPS (+5.6% of a single card)
Civilization V - Three 7970: 82.50 FPS (-0.1% of a single card)
Civilization V - Four 7970: 83.00 FPS (+0.1% of a single card)
If we look at Metro 2033, we know from previous experience that it is a tough benchmark. It loves GPU power in all forms, and a system to back it up. With the scaling, we observe that it tends to a limit, with a series of four cards giving just over double the single card performance. Metro2033 is a perfect example of the law of diminishing returns, with the second card almost doubling performance, then the third card giving another ~40% of a card, and the final card giving another ~13%.
Metro 2033 - One 7970: 32.85 FPS
Metro 2033 - Two 7970: 61.63 FPS (+87.6% of a single card)
Metro 2033 - Three 7970: 74.59 FPS (+39.5% of a single card)
Metro 2033 - Four 7970: 78.90 FPS (+13.1% of a single card)
Dirt 3 is almost in a different league - this game seems to love GPU power and scales very well with it. Keep adding cards equals to an increase in FPS that is calculable (whether it is noticeable is up to the setup and users' eyes). We see that each additional card adds ~60% or above the performance of a single card:
Dirt 3 - One 7970: 73.95 FPS
Dirt 3 - Two 7970: 136.28 FPS (+84.3% of a single card)
Dirt 3 - Three 7970: 195.11 FPS (+79.6% of a single card)
Dirt 3 - Four 7970: 237.40 FPS (+57.2% of a single card)
Ultimately, the scaling a user will experience is highly dependant on the game, the engine that game uses, and the drivers at hand. If your main games are using the EGO 2.0 engine, then more cards seems like more performance!
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
34 Comments
View All Comments
jontech - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
But sounds kind of cool,.Helps that Asus makes it :)
Paulman - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Asus Republic of Gamers also holds Starcraft tournaments, as well! That's how I first heard of their brand. In fact, the ASUS ROG Starcraft II Summer 2012 tournament is on right now and I'm watching a game vs. EG.IdrA and EG.Puma (same team, but one American teammate versus a Korean teammate).For more info on this tourney, see: http://rog.asus.com/142982012/gaming/join-the-rog-...
primeval - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
A fun tournament thus far.For the branding portion of this article, I highly recommend checking out some of ASUS ROG's commercials. They have been playing throughout the aforementioned tournament and I have to say they are probably the best hardware commercials I have ever seen in terms of production quality. I think that if you see a few of those commercials, you may be able to further rationalize the branding award.
Meaker10 - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
1x/16x/8x/16x would kill any dual card setup in a micro atx case, kinda defeating the point....just4U - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
the 8x slot is rather pointless...danjw - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
I would rather see an article on the Ivybridge ROG motherboards then the Sandybridge-E ones. These are very niche boards, though I guess that is only slightly less true of the Ivybridge boards. For heavily threaded and memory intensive applications Sandybridge-E will win. But not really on much else, though they are chosen by some just because they are the most expensive.StevoLincolnite - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
Also, Sandy Bridge overclocks higher and throws out less heat, because of the silly design choice that Intel made in regards to the heat spreader compound.Not a problem for those who are up to the task of removing the IHS or lapping.
Sad part is that Ivy Bridge actually has nice thermals and power consumption at stock; which could have translated well for enthusiasts.
IvyBridge-E should be out within the next year, haswell will get released and the cycle shall continue.
Hopefully we get 8 core Ivybridge-E chips, which is severely lacking on the Socket 2011 platform with the 3930K's being die harvested 8 core chips, plus most socket 2011 motherboards will take an Ivybridge-e chip anyway, when they're released.
danjw - Friday, August 3, 2012 - link
I was just looking at "leaked" slide that shows Ivy Bridge-E out in Q3 2013 and Haswell out in Q2 2013. I really don't see what the point is of an Ivy Bridge-E if Haswell beats it to the market. With Sandy Bridge-E they released it before the Ivy Bridge tock. I just don't see why that would make much sense.Assimilator87 - Saturday, August 4, 2012 - link
Haswell will probably be limited to four cores, whereas Ivy Bridge-E will scale up to ten cores.mapesdhs - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link
I was hunting for R4E refs and found this. It's strange reading what people expected was going to happen back when the R4E was new. IB-E with 10 cores eh? Oh well. Mind you, that did happen with IB-EP, and infact the XEON E5-2680 v2 is one of the best upgrades one can do for an X79 mbd, at least for threaded performance anyway. Hard to avoid wondering how things would have panned out if the 3930K had simply been a fully functional 8-core in the first place, instead of the crippled sampled chip consumers were offered. However, I obtained quite a few, and they still work pretty well, especially with so many PCIe lanes to play with, and it's cool being able to use a 950 Pro to boot from NVMe (comes with its own boot ROM), though the ROG forum does have a thread with custom BIOS profiles available to add native NVMe boot support to various ASUS mbds.