3 ms·

Honestly though, I think even in PC gaming, the processor is not where the bottleneck is at. In the early 2000's, buying a new processor every year would yield

Honestly though, I think even in PC gaming, the processor is not where the bottleneck is at. In the early 2000's, buying a new processor every year would yield noticeable returns in gaming performance. Once we entered the console port life cycle (circa 2008), where the performance of the dominant consoles defined what developers put in games, I found that from 2010-2014 I was able to use the same processor (and not a top of the line one) with no trouble, and only an intermediate graphics card upgrade. I'm now on the core that I bought in 2014, and I honestly expect it to be good until 2020. We'll see a bit more get juiced out of graphics cards, but we're nearing a stage where the cost of making graphics good enough to overwhelm modern graphics cards will be so high that it won't make sense from a cost/benefit perspective. At that point, I expect CUDA applications to be the driving force behind graphics card R&D.

potatolicious 10y ago
This bears out in benchmarks too - you can find sites that benchmark games against multiple generations of Intel CPUs and find that the performance difference is minimal to nonexistent. I'm running a Haswell i7 in my gaming machine and looking at the numbers I'll maybe get a ~3% bump by "upgrading" to Skylake. No thanks.
untoreh 10y ago
considering the fact that most AAA titles are glorified visual experiences it is no surprise cpu is not the bottleneck, requiring probably very little logic and not having to render more than a 60dg first person FOV. However, when you try any game that has some flavor of RTS to it, they start trudging, I remember reading RTS games target 20fps as optimal performance in general, because of lots of polygons but also because they need to track a lot of stuff compared to your average scripted experience. Free roamers a la gta/arma/watch dogs also cpu bound, just like most MMOs which have to display lots of stuff and track of lots of things. The gaming segment is definitely something that would benefit from beefier cpus I would say. Another factor to take into consideration is that people change gpu more often than cpu (I would blame intel and their sockets policies but I dont know) so it is obvious you target the lower common denominator which is gonna be the cpu therefore games that don't use lots of cpu to begin with. Last argument, cpu usage in games can't really be scaled like gpu usage, you can turn down shadows at best but a game is gonna always use that much cpu, being again thelowest common denominator.
- golergka 10y ago
  As much as I love CPU-heavy Paradox RTS games, I really doubt that they're on Intel's mind.

potatolicious 10y ago

This bears out in benchmarks too - you can find sites that benchmark games against multiple generations of Intel CPUs and find that the performance difference is minimal to nonexistent. I'm running a Haswell i7 in my gaming machine and looking at the numbers I'll maybe get a ~3% bump by "upgrading" to Skylake. No thanks.

untoreh 10y ago

considering the fact that most AAA titles are glorified visual experiences it is no surprise cpu is not the bottleneck, requiring probably very little logic and not having to render more than a 60dg first person FOV. However, when you try any game that has some flavor of RTS to it, they start trudging, I remember reading RTS games target 20fps as optimal performance in general, because of lots of polygons but also because they need to track a lot of stuff compared to your average scripted experience. Free roamers a la gta/arma/watch dogs also cpu bound, just like most MMOs which have to display lots of stuff and track of lots of things. The gaming segment is definitely something that would benefit from beefier cpus I would say. Another factor to take into consideration is that people change gpu more often than cpu (I would blame intel and their sockets policies but I dont know) so it is obvious you target the lower common denominator which is gonna be the cpu therefore games that don't use lots of cpu to begin with. Last argument, cpu usage in games can't really be scaled like gpu usage, you can turn down shadows at best but a game is gonna always use that much cpu, being again thelowest common denominator.

golergka 10y ago
As much as I love CPU-heavy Paradox RTS games, I really doubt that they're on Intel's mind.