A few days ago i decided to make the jump from an AMD FX-8120 to an Intel i5 3570k and recorded the CPU and motherboard change for a video.
I made the jump because the Intel CPU is far better a playing certain games namely AMRA 2 with DayZero and ARMA 3. It also prevents a weird graphical glitch in Mass Effect 1 on the Noveria Peak 15 level and on Ilos that is caused by using an AMD Fx cpu. (I have know idea what causes it).
I know that 95% of my games wont see an improvement with the new CPU. I also wanted to take advantage on the Intel virtualization when running the Android Emulator for testing apps on older versions of android that GenyMotion doesn't provide.
The rest of the specs:
Old Mobo - Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3
New Mobo - Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H
Cooler - Alkasa Venom something or other
RAM - 8GB Corsair Vengeance 1600Mhz
PSU - Cooler Master Silent Pro 1000W, from when I had two 560Ti's.
That i5 is faster but if you are expecting great performance improvements when it comes to arma, I hate to ruin it for you but that game as I recall works far better with amd.
We all know Intel has better single core performance. Once Intel comes out with cheap multicore chips, AMD will have improved IPC. If you want to upgrade every year, Intel will be a good option. If you want to upgrade in 2-3 years, AMD will be cheaper and run just as fast when the software moves forward.
Arma Performance it mostly based on your cpu and ram speed as dumb as it is thats what makes the difference another thing that helps is a fast hard drive putting the game on an ssd or using an ssd cache helps fps by a decent amount in Arma for some reason. Your video card does not matter quite as much any thing better then a gtx 660 or hd 7870 is just fine. My friend uses an AMD fx6300 @4ghz with 8gb of 1333mhz ram and a HD 7790 and I am using a i7 3770k @4.2 and 16gb of 1600mhz ram and a ssd cache on my HDD and gtx 660 and when playing I was getting about 60 in that spot and he was getting about 45 we were using the same video settings 1080p and next to each other in the server so there is a little real world comparison. BTW the video cards were not at maximum usage about 50-70% usage it was other factors determining fps.
Measuring GPU usage (or CPU usage) is very misleading. 60% GPU usage doesn't mean the GPU isn't working as hard as it can. Arma in general is a terrible game for comparing hardware. Some people with relatively crap systems get consistently good framerates, and some people with dual Xeons and 8 Titans get shit framerates.
It's really sensitive to something outside pure GPU and CPU, and nobody can seem to figure out what it is.
No you don't, Haxm is a proprietary intel virtualization acceleration for closed source operating systems, in linux, there is no Haxm, because the open source kvm acceleration is faster, and it works on AMD just as well, and in many instances even better, than on Intel. Haxm is not necessary for development, it just partly fixes the virtualization handicap in Windows and OSX, but without Haxm, you can still develop for Android, it's entirely optional. Intel itself recognizes that most Android development is done on linux with kvm acceleration.