The name of the tread pretty much explains itself. I I were to have an i7-4960x, how would this perform in more graphically intense Dolphin games? Also, will it be a significant increase over something that's a bit lower grade like the i7-4770k? Finally, if paired with a great GPU, would I be able to max out if not all, then most games on Dolphin if I have a steep enough Overclock? I imagine people mostly avoid spending $1000 on a CPU unless they have a REALLY good reason. But if someone maybe has some of knowledge about the performance that it would put out on Dolphin, please tell me. I'm pretty sure other people are curious as well!
The 4960x is still an Ivy-Bridge and that's one generation behind the Haswell CPUs i.e., 4770K. The IPC (instruction per clock) on the 4770K is faster than the 4960x, but the 4960x does have a much bigger cache size and has 100Mhz advantage over the 4770K. What it really boil down to is that which ever CPU can achieve an higher overclock will provides you with the best gaming performance/experience.
Haswell is 30% faster than Ivy Bridge in Dolphin Benchmark . Unless you overclocked that Ivy Bridge to 5.8GHz or higher , no way it could beat i7 4770k @ 4.2GHz
If you want to spend 1000$ on a CPU , you better wait for the new Haswell-E CPU i7 5970x ( 8 cores 16 threads ) . While it's a monster CPU that has excellent multi-threaded performance , it still maintain excellent single threaded performance . i7 5970x will be released in summer
i5 4670k and i7 4770k have the same performance . Bigger cache size doesn't mean anything to Dolphin
As you can see in
our official Dolphin Benchmark, i5 4670k @ 4.4GHz outperforms i7 4770k @ 4.3GHz .
^This. Any high end haswell cpu is a better choice for dolphin by a mile.
Bigger cache size probably *is* useful to Dolphin, since the JIT has a lot of random crap it needs cached, but not extremely useful.
The more important question is how useful. We still don't really know the effect of different cache sizes, cache latencies, cache bandwidth, cache sharing, etc. at different levels (L1, L2, L3). Generally speaking though applications like dolphin encounter little benefit from increased L3 size. Our own cpu benchmark seems to back that up too.