homepage Forums Air Combat & Civil Aviation IL-2: Cliffs of Dover Recommended CPU

Looks like the game is GPU bound for the moment. Anyone has data about CPU requirements? CPU loads? I plan to upgrade soon and the next one must last at least 3 years. CoD could be one of the most exigent CPU games in the future. Right now I must decide if I go with Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge E.

Thanks in advance.

I'm running an i7 2700K @4.8Ghz, and a ASUS AMD6950 6 head card (overclocked but still not the fastest on the planet).
Playing back the black death track my average frame rate is 41 fps (1920x1080, everything on maximum except trees and buildings one notch down). CPU load is about 10-15%... so yes, CPU is somewhat less important. For comparison, the same graphics card fed with an core2quad (Q6600 @3Ghz) managed 25fps. Bearing in mind the motherboard (gigabyte P35-DS3R)was PCIe v1 (half the data rate of v2) this wasn't so bad.

If you plan a upgrade that's gonna last at least 3 years i would go for LGA 2011 with I7 39xx cpu.
Those are the fastest CPU's today. You get a 6 Core CPU doing 12 threads. You could go for the cheaper 3820K. Though it is a quad core CPU it's also about half the price of a 3930K which is worth considering. In the end, the wallet has to vote to

Most of the new LGA 2011 motherboards (if not all) offers the new PCIE 3.0 slots.
I just upgraded to this and it's simply amazingly fast.

In Black Death i get an average on 42fps and max 68fps with my rig running in 1920x1080 all settings maxed out.
All smooth with one exception in Black death. That's when a bomb goes up on the runway, in close-up, where it drops down to about 20fps. But that's my gfx cards fault

This is on stock speed as I'm not much of an overclocker. I prefer stability

There is an insinuation there that overclocking reduces stability. It's simply not true if a) you know what you are doing and b) you do it correctly and don't overdo it. The only hard fact about overclocking is that you are pushing up the TDP of the system, and therefore getting a bigger electricity bill

That aside, rather than spending money on CPU, I would recommend to put it into the GPU, if directx games are the primary purpose of the machine of course. Having PCIe V3 would be nice, and directly affects the speed of the GPU while it's loading textures.

(BTW - you don't have to go to LGA2011 for PCIe V3, a lot of new LGA1155 socket boards are PCIe V3 now, but it depends entirely on the Ivy bridge CPU (22nm) that will provide the PCIe V3 functionality, not the motherboard).

Actually no. I said i'm not much of an overclocker. That's the only insinuation. Overclocking has come miles ahead since the time i was fiddling with it out about 10 years ago but i just don't bother with it because the systems, for my use, are more than fast enough

But you are right about the PCIE3.0. I just haven't looked at the newest 1155 boards.

Aha, got it. Sorry, I misread it.
When I first started overclocking all those years ago it meant at the least changing out a clock chip, unsoldering and replacing crystals, or at worst breaking tracks and soldering jumper wires - and putting H/S Fans on CPUs which weren't actually designed to need them. The end result was the 16 colour spinning dodecahedron on the screen rotated a bit faster/smoother - those were the days

Thanks for the answers guys. I think I will need more data to decide. I suppose the game is not multi-threaded. Sandy Bridge could have a little more longevity since Ivy Bridge E has been pushed back to H2 of 2013.

From my reading over the last year, CPU makes very little difference with this sim. People with AMD X4's would sometimes get better performance than someone with a 2600k. This sim just makes no sense! GPU first, I say.

It's not GPU bound, it's developer bound.

Best off saving your money, and once they have gotten it out of the current alpha, and the coming beta, then the 1.0 release you'll be in a better position to buy an upgrade, and not suffer the CLOD video card depreciation rate.

I do wonder sometimes that a game designed to be cutting edge doesn't push the CPU more, my 460 (at least the first one until I can get SLI to work) is on 99% load pretty much all the time, yet my proccessors are more or less freewheeling. I did migrate my 460(the first one) from my old machine which had a 9550 Phenomx4, my frame rates did improve by around 15%ish but I have a feeling that it was a *$@/? OEM motherboard that was bottlenecking that system more than the CPU.
If was building a system from scratch right now I would buy the best processor I could afford. Not because I think it will improve my games by any great measure, but beacause its likely to outlast the GPU I put in by a long chalk. Oh and PCIe 3 on the mobo as well, its probably overkill for the hardware we have to plug in it right now, but as we all know things move fast, especially where GFX are concerned.

I forgot: Do the game use multiple cores?. I think CPU requirements could go up, the Damaged FM is not there, and that could require a lot of calculations.

Well, I've gone from an AMD Phenom 965BE 3,4GHz 4 core CPU+Sapphire AMD HD6850 setup to an Intel Core i3 2120 3,3GHz dual core+EVGA Geforce GTX 550ti rig and my Intel+Nvidia system is showing better performance than my "old" AMD+AMD system. It seems CloD -at the moment- prefers Nvidia cards because my old 6850 should be a better card than the GTX 550ti but in this case apparently not. It also seems CloD doesn't care so much about how many cores you have but rather how good of a CPU you have and my "poor" little dual core i3 is beating my old Phenom II 965BE quad core silly. You might be right though, core demand might rise so I would say, go for a i5 2500 because it's the best -IMO- quad core and get yourself a nice cheap little 1155 motherboard but check that you can update the BIOS for Ivy Bridge compatibility for future use.

Exactly

I should say the 2 are important equally important.