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I'll say it upfront, I have a personal bias in favor of AMD. However, I do admit when I'm wrong. During the Phenom II and the first FX reboot I was wrong and in denial. My intel/nvidia fanboy friends won't let me forget that. However, since Vishera, I really gotta hand it to AMD.

The Haswell line is no doubt better than AMD's FX9 series for CPUs.

NVidia vs. AMD is pretty much a practical draw at this point, pick whichever you like most.

Here is an ancedotal, small set of survey results from members of my guild, Natural Order, in the USA:


Now, I want to just throw this out there, while Intel crushes AMD in some benchmarks and some games which take advantage of its architecture, there is a significant cost difference not just with the CPU, but the motherboard as well. I'm not saying AMD is better or don't buy intel. If I was building the best of the best machines with no brand loyalty, there'd be an intel processor in there.

Here's a good breakdown of Ivybridge vs. FX8 series (Vishera). The 3770k is one of the most popular CPUs ever chosen for a high-end gaming PC. Most intel fanbois say the AMD FX-8350 is equivalent to an i5. I think they're no better than the AMD people who live in complete denial.

Results speak for themselves:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx- ... 407-3.html" target="_blank


But when you flip it to extreme, the AMD holds up much better, with a lot less performance loss:


In actual video games at low settings, the benchmarks make intel look miles better than AMD, but in reality, why would you play in low settings with a high-end rig? Because once you flip to max settings, the gap shrinks substantially (I believe many sites skew benchmarks in favor of intel):


Further, overall scores for benchmarks don't tell a full story. It could peak really high with one brand over the other, throwing the result off. When you analyze performance over time, AMD systems prove to be more consistent, just with smaller peaks:
AMD:
Intel:

Ok so what happens when you add 3 displays? 4800x900 resolution, AMD can handle it, intel falls down:
AMD:
Intel:

Battlefield3:

FPS peaks and trends show virtually no gaming difference: except under extreme loads, with 4 monitors, AMD is more consistent, with less peaking, and more stable framerates:


Point to intel, Skyrim clearly is not designed for AMD architecture:


No detailed post for graphics cards, explore the internet all you wish-- once you strip away the bias from each camp, you'll see they are essentially equal:
http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/ ... 2uOyvlXARW" target="_blank

I went back to nVidia a while ago and that definitely feels good. My i7 does what it needs to, I'm not as picky with CPUs, though maybe I really should be.

I tend to be pretty flexible when it comes to what I put in my PC.

My last build used a radeon card, this time I'm running with an nVidia. Mainly, it comes down to how much I have to spend and what types of upgrades I'm looking at. However, I do seem to always end up with AMD CPUs (which probably isn't the best since I mainly play WoW >.<)

I tend to be pretty flexible when it comes to what I put in my PC.

My last build used a radeon card, this time I'm running with an nVidia. Mainly, it comes down to how much I have to spend and what types of upgrades I'm looking at. However, I do seem to always end up with AMD CPUs (which probably isn't the best since I mainly play WoW >.<)

What's cool though for AMD users is WoW's new tech coming in WoD will be far less CPU demanding. AMD's next set of drivers for Radeon cards is going to also enable the GPU to snag some of that tedious processing away from the CPU as well. Some big performance gains are coming via software in the future.

But yeah basically, just like frost mage stats-- buy whichever you like, they're all close!

I currently run an nVidia 750 GTX OC, seems to handle pretty much everything quite well. I kind of fear that I'll be buying a new card before 2016 though :/

What's cool though for AMD users is WoW's new tech coming in WoD will be far less CPU demanding. AMD's next set of drivers for Radeon cards is going to also enable the GPU to snag some of that tedious processing away from the CPU as well. Some big performance gains are coming via software in the future.

Do you have a source for this? It'd be amazing if they move towards being less CPU demanding and putting more load on the GPU, but it sounds like a mindset change from what they said before. It'd also require big changes in the game engine I think, and I don't have too much faith in that happening.

CASC!

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13645405" target="_blank

Sounds interesting!

Mm, on the desktop CPU side sadly there's no real competition at all. And sadly that won't change in quite a while with AMD announcing them focusing on other things for now at least.

On GPU side I've always been rooting for ATI/AMD and I will probably never stray away again unless something really bad happens. But with "mantle" in the horizon, I doubt AMD will fade in relevancy.

Yes Mantle works with Intel too, so it's gonna rock.

nVidia's playing dirty though, colluding with game manufacturers to limit performance on AMD systems-- which AMD better sue them hard.

CASC!

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/13645405" target="_blank

I've read the post on the new CASC format, but my feeling for it is less of a CPU optimization.

Speed—Real-world game performance should increase for many players thanks to a non-redundant file structure—in layman’s terms, the game can find the assets it’s looking for more quickly.

My interpretation of what this means is that resource seeking will be faster, which mostly means faster loading times, and faster appearance of far away entities on the screen. This will be particularly noticeable for folks who don't play on SSDs. I don't think it changes much in terms of the CPU vs GPU load though.

Everything still has to go through the northbridge and my understanding is that part of CASC (I did one CASC project about a year ago for a client) is that it dynamically fetches for data to cut down on bottlenecks. So I guess the idea is-- less grains of sand are going through the hourglass at the same time, but faster-- so more overall.

Yes Mantle works with Intel too, so it's gonna rock.

nVidia's playing dirty though, colluding with game manufacturers to limit performance on AMD systems-- which AMD better sue them hard.

I heard about this as well. It all comes down to the Nvidia's Gameworks tool, apparently - games using it aren't optimised for AMD.
I'm on AMD myself; the prices were MUCH more reasonable for a very minor performance loss (and let's be honest, WoW could run on a toaster if you shoved enough RAM in there).