Specs to run AHII

[skribetm]

windows 7 works perfect with AMD. besides wasn't it microsoft who made x86-64/AMD64 a brilliant success and itanium/IA-64 a dismal failure?
send him over to http://www.amdzone.com/phpbb3/ if you cant get it stable. we havent had that much trouble troubleshooting set-ups, not that theres that many diY'ers having trouble with their builds anyway. only two ones weve had over the past year 2010 has been with HTSF errors, and its just with the MSI board. most/all we get over there are converts bit!&#( about how an overpriced pos their past intel cpu was- while getting just as much(and frankly they cant tell the difference)- if not better performance with their amd cpu's.

*edit: maybe he's trying to play AH2 at the same clocks as the one in my sig?  

[Ghastly]

That's what makes forums like this a great venue.  I myself, having been both burned in the past and at having at best never had a better than "just OK" experience with AMD-based solutions, if left to my own devices would likely never try them again. 

[ Aside -> The problem is that AMD now has to be better on something other than just a few percentage points on pricing.  Even if we take it on faith that the AMD based system that's equivalent in nearly everything that a normal user would tend to do (Skuzzy's movie encoding is IMO a special case, and not something the average person does enough to matter) is much improved in stability over some of the previous AMD-based solutions - which in some instances were unmitigated disasters - even if you save 10-15% compared to Intel up through to the point where the AMD systems can no longer compete, it's just not enough because "improved" doesn't shout to the masses "equally stable and robust".  Even if we're generous and assume we can pare 15% across the board the savings on a $1300 system is going to come in at around $200 max  - and of course less money as we go down the scale to where we can more easily capitalize on the savings. For anyone who's been burned, 10-15% and/or a couple of hundred dollars at best - especially amortized over the life of the system - is just not enough to risk going out on the limb for given past experiences.  ]

If enough regular people begin to say that they are using the newer AMD stuff and it's working well for them - I'll listen.  I'd swore off ATI cards for life a bit short of most of a decade ago too after an absolutely disastrous foray into using their cards - but couldn't be happier with the switch to AMD with my current rig.  Fanboi's work against themselves though - when those who are making the claims appear to be on a crusade, their objectivity seems questionable at best.

And techie's have long memories - a manufacturer burns our fingers and it's a long, long time before we'll trust them enough to put our hands back in the pot.

Again, all IMO - take it for what it cost you .

<S>

[skribetm]

The reasons Intel outperforms AMD is many, and I am not going to get into that, but very little of it has to do with any type of code optimizations.  The fact is, AMD is competing for Intel business and it is up to AMD to build a better mouse trap which executes code as well or better than Intel.

In other words, no one sould be able to write any type of code that would benefit Intel over AMD, unless AMD did a poor job executing that code.

Now, to the overall question at hand.  Intel CPU's/chipsets will run Aces High better than AMD CPU's/chipsets.

skuzzy, i wanted to get back to this. software is just as important as hardware, and if you could provide better technical information other than the "mousetrap" analogy, id appreciate it much. for example, what compiler is used on the client-side AH2 program?

the reason why you see some windows based benchmarketing software runs infinitely better on intel is because some of these becnhmarks, in addition to optimized code, are compiled with ICC. it is important that the end consumer get the whole picture and not just resort to posting colorful bar charts.

fwiw, i hope AH2 doesnt use ICC in any of its releases.

http://bit.ly/5vGcmV

THE US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) apparently is interested in the fact that Intel's compiler deliberately cripples performance for non-Intel processors such as those made by AMD and VIA.

Writing in his blog, programming expert Agner Fog said that it appears that Chipzilla's compiler can produce different versions of pieces of code, with each version being optimised for a specific processor and/or instruction set. The system detects which CPU it's running on and chooses the optimal code path accordingly.

But it also checks what instruction sets are supported by the CPU and it also checks the vendor ID string. If the string says 'GenuineIntel' then it uses the optimal code path. If the CPU is not from Intel then, in most cases, it will use the slowest version of the code it can find.

While this is known, few Intel compiler users actually seem to know about it. Chipzilla does not say that the compiler is Intel-specific, either.

Fog said that if more programmers knew this fact they would probably use another compiler as everyone wants their code to run just as well on AMD's processors as on Intel's.

Some benchmarking programs are affected by this, up to a point where benchmark results can differ greatly depending on how a processor identifies itself.

[Skuzzy]

We use Visual Studio.