Cache is king for gaming because of the sheer amount of data needing to be processed. Anything ALU limited in games is categorically not being cache or memory l

Cache is king for gaming because of the sheer amount of data needing to be processed. Anything ALU limited in games is categorically not being cache or memory limited because of how memory speed starved modern CPU cores are so making the cores stupid fast only takes you so far. Especially with the insane power budget these chips ask for. Games need to do a crazy amount of branchy unpredictable work on an enormous dataset so they're very often limited by memory latency which is alleviated most readily by more cache and prefetching. It's why the ECS pattern is so popular as of late from a performance standpoint because it encourages more logic to be written as iterations over dense linear arrays which are just about the best case for a CPUs cache management and prefetching logic. Factorio is probably the best example of this because it's a game where performance is entirely CPU limited where AAA games more often used in benchmarks are much more dominated by GPU time.