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Forums - PC Discussion - Why you really don't need to buy in i7 CPU for gaming (or even an i5).

This is old knowledge but I am thankful you became an advocat for it. The myth of the importance of fast CPU's for gaming is still strong.



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Some games are pretty cpu intensive like msflightsim, arma2, gw2, anno ...
but for those there is no need for an i7, but you will notice the difference from a phenom? to i5.

i7 is needed for encoding, compiling, cad, ps and other things, but not for gaming.



Slimebeast said:
This is old knowledge but I am thankful you became an advocat for it. The myth of the importance of fast CPU's for gaming is still strong.


all depends on what you are trying to accomplish and where the bottlenecks are for certain games, these days a fast CPU is for live streaming while you play as things are being offloaded more and more to GPUs.



You should try Sleeping Dogs driving around at high speed during the day. Murder on the CPU. Also Skyrim in whiterun is was pretty CPU bound with shadows on max, and Dragon Age: Origins was lol.

But yea a games designed for PC will usually GPU bound these days.



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Cool i got the i3.



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i5 2500k certainly showed me performance.



Similar conclusions were drawn in this article:

http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-today-cpus/1

They didn't actually test any i3s, but here are some useful takeaways:

- Don't bother putting an AMD CPU into your gaming machine.
- You don't really want the highest FPS, you want the most consistent FPS.
- Faster CPUs will actually still improve the number and consistency of FPS (i.e., it's not just about GPUs these days).
- i7s really aren't worth the extra money for gaming purposes. Even the higher-end i5s don't yield much improvement. Most important is getting the latest class of architecture.



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Surely some of the future will depends on how complex the CPU architecture is in the next gen of consoles. If they have powerful CPUs then games ported over from the consoles will likely need powerful CPUs on the PC side.

Currently though, I agree. GPU is far more important then CPU for gaming. However, a few games do need a decent CPU to run reasonably well like Dragon Age Origins and Guild Wars 2.



famousringo said:
Similar conclusions were drawn in this article:

http://techreport.com/review/23246/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-today-cpus/1

They didn't actually test any i3s, but here are some useful takeaways:

- Don't bother putting an AMD CPU into your gaming machine.
- You don't really want the highest FPS, you want the most consistent FPS.
- Faster CPUs will actually still improve the number and consistency of FPS (i.e., it's not just about GPUs these days).
- i7s really aren't worth the extra money for gaming purposes. Even the higher-end i5s don't yield much improvement. Most important is getting the latest class of architecture.

I don't have the time or tools to measure the consistency of the frame delivery and their latency, so I have to take their results to be true.

Going over the article I can't help but feel they are making a big deal of something that really isn't that big of a deal. I personally don't see much difference on an AMD platform versus Intel in frame delivery when both are GPU bound and doing 55 fps in Crysis 2 per say.

If we take their Batman benchmark and look at AMD low and Intel mid... yes intels have less latency spikes when rendering the frames, however the difference isn't large at all.  Phenom 980 seems to deliver 10-70 ms of latency where the i5 2500k is doing 10-60ms. I don't see that being a large difference at all... It just sounds like something that only the hardcore of the hardcore would notice.



So yeah, I don't agree with their "don't bother putting AMD CPU in to gaming machine" conclusion at all.



zarx said:
You should try Sleeping Dogs driving around at high speed during the day. Murder on the CPU. Also Skyrim in whiterun is was pretty CPU bound with shadows on max, and Dragon Age: Origins was lol.

But yea a games designed for PC will usually GPU bound these days.

Damn it, I have none of these games nor do I want to play them lol...

Games I looked at were Mero 2033, Max Payne 3, Dirt Showdown, Mafia 2, Crysis 2, Battlefied 3, Sonic Generations and Alan Wake.

The most CPU bound game I saw was Sonic Generations lol. Was doing around 60-70 fps on 3 screens with GPUs at 60% load. Curiously CPU wasn't maxed out either so it made me wonder if it was a memory controller bottleneck or possibly bad SLI driver that was ausing it.