I have always been pretty much brand neutral when it comes to CPUS and GPUS. For the last 3 or so years, I have been running AMD. My most current AMD processor being a Phenom II 955. I really loved that processor because of its great price\performance and AMD's tendency to keep socket compatibility alive through multiple chip generations. Having said that, I always had issues running that chip in AH. First with a ATI 5770, and then with a 6870. No matter what I did, AH would always nearly max out core 0 when there were a lot of planes in the area, and when that happened, my game would slow to a crawl. I could never understand what was happening because I only use my windows computer for gaming and have no anti virus or any other 3rd party background software installed at all. I followed pretty much all the guides out there to reduce resource hogs, and used all of Skuzzy's recommendations as well. The odd thing was that in every other game I played ( I play a lot), I never had issues with my AMD chip. It was fantastic, and I loved it, but AH is my main\favorite game to play, so I finally gave up and bought an intel 2600k. Keeping the same ram, and other hardware, I installed the new MB and CPU, and reinstalled windows. The change was Dramatic. Now the game is spread out on a couple cores, and so far the only time I have seen frames drop below 60 is in FSOs when 100+ planes are taking off at once. They drop in to the 30s, where before in FSOs , they would be near single digits on take off. Now, I am aware the 2600k is more expensive, but the difference in performance is not nearly so dramatic in other games. It makes me wonder..what is it about AH that doesn't allow you to take advantage of AMD's multi cores? AMD's strength, especially in bulldozer is its multiple cores. Per core performance is way behind intel, and I just wonder what the future holds for Bulldozer within AH. I would love to go back to AMD someday, but I refuse if it is not working well in this game.
