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Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?
by morley 8y ago
Are there any games nowadays that are CPU bound to the extent that you'd see a big performance improvement by using a high-end processor?
- LeoPanthera 8y agoNot many, but a few. Civilization still thinks quite hard in the late game.
- mikepurvis 8y agoBut it's turn based— most of the time that you're playing, nothing is happening! Surely it could be running its simulations and AI speculatively and then just tossing out the bits which aren't relevant any more as the player makes changes to the world state.
- gameswithgo 8y agothat would be extremely complex to be able to toss out the bits which are no longer relevant. everything might be no longer relevant.
- mikepurvis 8y agoMost turn-based bots are in some way derived from minimax— you peer down the road looking at the space of possible moves and evaluate them based on an assumption that your opponent will respond with the strongest possible move available to them, so each move you can make now is only as good as the game state after the opponent's response, recursively. I think basically as you're building up this tree you'd add annotations at each branch/ply which call out things the human user (opponent) could do that strengthen or weaken the position. Then as the human performs their actions, the tree is pruned/rebuilt accordingly.
- gameswithgo 8y agoYes with Chess you can do exactly that no problem, but I bet Civ has a thousand heuristics woven through that which would make it horribly difficult. Maybe not impossible though! The other complication is it isn't just 1 on 1, its 1 player vs ~10 players. So your move changes player 2's move changes player 3's move and so on.
- LeoPanthera 8y agoThe number of possible things you can do is a Large Number, so I doubt how possible this would be. Even if it were - it would absolutely murder battery life. Civilization runs on laptops, and now iOS too.
- tormeh 8y agoi7-9700K offers about 10% better performance than the 2700X for this[0][1] for about the same percentage increase in price. Pretty decent. Worth noting that the i9-9900K and i7-9700K are about the same here. 0: https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel-i9-9900k-review-benchmarks#nn-graph-sheet-civilization-vi-ai https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel-i9-9900k-review-benchmarks#nn... 1: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th-gen-cpu,5847-4.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9900k-9th...
- ac29 8y ago10% doesn't matter if it exceeds what your monitor can handle. For example, in Tech Report's benchmarking, even a i5-8400 is well over 60Hz in many current games at 1080p on maximum settings. [0] If you want to run the latest games on max settings at 4K/120hz, it's a different story. Personally? I remember when reviews gushed over 30fps at 800x600. [0] https://techreport.com/review/34192/intel-core-i9-9900k-cpu-reviewed https://techreport.com/review/34192/intel-core-i9-9900k-cpu-...
- Armisael16 8y agoDid you respond to the wrong comment? No one much cares about the framerate in civ6. It's about AI turn calculations in the end of the game, which is what the benchmarks people were linking are.
- gnufied 8y agoI dunno where you are getting your numbers from but currently 9700k is approximately 40% costlier than 2700x. $420 vs $280. Heck - I can walk into nearby microcenter can get both 2700x CPU + motherboard at $350.
- seanalltogether 8y agoOnly for games that require lots of individual object/ai management, like Ashes of the Singularity or maybe civ games
- nemothekid 8y agoCPU performance also tends to matter for competitive gaming where you will normally turn down graphics in order to match your monitor's frame rate (144 or 240hz). Overwatch is one game where in order to get 240hz, your RAM speed and timing can be a bigger bottleneck than your graphics card.
- rb666 8y agoAnyone that thinks 240hz is useful is a nutcase. Show me a double-blind test that proves it. People will go far defending their outrageous purchases however.
- zrav 8y agoOn CRT monitors the difference between 120 and 200Hz was very noticeable in fast arena shooters. On LCDs with their inherent motion blur there's probably less of a difference between 144 and 240Hz, but I'm not going to call it placebo due to my previous experience with high frequency CRTs.
- hnuser1234 8y agoMay I ask how old you are?
- davemp 8y agoI think minecraft with a lot of entities can be pretty CPU bound.
- majormjr 8y agoGames with many different objects interacting with each other tend to stress the CPU. I know Factorio likes having very fast memory and CPU clock speed despite not being too graphically intensive.
- Waterluvian 8y agoAlso particularly the fact that Factorio runs a complex sim in "real-time" which means it has something like 17 or 33 ms to calculate every tick. Games like X-COM have the luxury of only having to advance the simulation every so often. The rest is just rendering the game's view.
- rjbwork 8y agoSame for rimworld, though I'm not quite sure as to what extent.
- gameswithgo 8y agojust getting the data to the gpu in a game can use quite a bit of cpu power. as well competitive gamers want ~140+ FPS so even when gameplay code is not super complex per frame, it is a lot of frames.
- Alupis 8y agoSimulators are still very highly single-threaded performance-bound. Particularly flight simulators.
- mikepurvis 8y agoThat's surprising to me; wouldn't they be able to represent huge chunks of world state as giant matrices, upon which operations are trivial to parallelize?
- Alupis 8y agoYes, but most flight sims are based on very old codebases. X-Plane has started to change, and Prepar3d too, but I imagine they're so complicated it's difficult to just do without breaking a lot of things. For the time being, even with latest versions, single-threaded cpu performance is the largest concern in these sims.
- dpedu 8y agoDwarf Fortress! But it's an outlier...
- barrow-rider 8y agoDepends on how many cats you have wandering around
- jagger27 8y agoCities Skylines crawls to a halt in big cities.
- lanius 8y agoStarCraft 2
- 83457 8y agoSource based games like Counter-strike Global Offensive, mainly due to the engine being older. I actually built a mid-range gaming/VR setup with AMD processor years ago with the thought that cpu didnt matter much but later got into competitive CSGO. Quickly realized I made a mistake as the Intel CPUs of comparable price were much better for that game. Ryzen changed that a bit though I don't have a build with one.
- kevindqc 8y agoWorld of Warcraft
- hoorayimhelping 8y agoKerbal Space Program will definitely benefit, especially if you have big part count stations and ships.