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

disolitude on 20 September 2012
Slimebeast said:
pezus said:
Slimebeast said:
pezus said:
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.

Even though the GPU is the most important, the CPU is still important as well. There are some popular games out there that are extremely CPU intensive.

Really? I would say "relatively" but not "extremely". Skyrim and Shogun 2 are relatively CPU intensive, but still much more dependant on a strong GPU.

Let's say you have a certain amount of money to spend on a CPU and GPU (it could be $200 as well as $800, it doesn't matter). There doesn't exist any popular game where you would benefit from putting half of that money in the CPU. All popular games benefit from putting most of that money into the GPU.


http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/skyrim-performance-benchmark,3074-9.html

This is what I call extremely. That GPU cost about the same as the i5 I think at the time. I say they are extremely dependent on CPU because if you have a mid to high range GPU, your FPS is always above 60 FPS in most cases (source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-670-review,3200-7.html). So, if you don't want to go under 60 FPS, having a good CPU as well as a good GPU is your best bet. I don't see how this makes it a myth that CPUs are important for gaming...

All right, I would call that extremely too. Skyrim at 1920x1080 actually does seem to benefit from putting more money into the CPU than GPU.

But we don't know if it would be worth it to go above a Core i5-2500K and spend another $100 for a Core i7. It might give us a bigger performance increase to use those $100 and go from say a Radeon 7850 to a Radeon 7950 (or a Geforce GTX 660 to a GTX 670), especially if you want to play a graphics modded Skyrim or in higher resolutions.

I am going to take this challenge on and test Skyrim on a Phenom X4 and i5 with a GTX 670. 



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disolitude on 20 September 2012
pezus said:
disolitude said:

I am going to take this challenge on and test Skyrim on a Phenom X4 and i5 with a GTX 670. 

Cool. Make sure to come back and report your findings!


I just noticed something in that Toms Hardware review of Skyrim for CPU requirements... 

"This game clearly relies on CPU power, and you need a Sandy Bridge-based Core i3 at 3 GHz or a Phenom II at 3.5 GHz to provide a minimum 30 FPS. Bear in mind that we're using the ultra detail setting here, and processing requirements drop significantly as you start stepping back. So, you can make due with a less potent chip when you dial in detail options appropriately."

Well yeah, lowering settings to high from ultra should make this run 60fps+ on most CPU platforms. Also I'm sure using Ultra detail on 3 monitors will again hit my GPU bottleneck before the CPU.

So I think my point stands. :)



disolitude on 20 September 2012
pezus said:
disolitude said:
pezus said:
disolitude said:

I am going to take this challenge on and test Skyrim on a Phenom X4 and i5 with a GTX 670. 

Cool. Make sure to come back and report your findings!


I just noticed something in that Toms Hardware review of Skyrim for CPU requirements... 

"This game clearly relies on CPU power, and you need a Sandy Bridge-based Core i3 at 3 GHz or a Phenom II at 3.5 GHz to provide a minimum 30 FPS. Bear in mind that we're using the ultra detail setting here, and processing requirements drop significantly as you start stepping back. So, you can make due with a less potent chip when you dial in detail options appropriately."

Well yeah, lowering settings to high from ultra should make this run 60fps+ on most CPU platforms. Also I'm sure using Ultra detail on 3 monitors will again hit my GPU bottleneck before the CPU.

So I think my point stands. :)

Ultra or nothing!!

haha...sure, but try and do a Pepsi challenge with graphical settings. Take Crysis 2 for example and have someone change it from ultra to high and see if you can tell the difference. You may be surprised at what you find.



famousringo on 20 September 2012
vlad321 said:
This is of GREAT interest for everyone then. This is just the last page witht heir fancy graphs, there'2 7 before this one, in case you were wondering.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/08/inside-the-second-gaming-performance-with-todays-cpus/8/


That's actually a repost of the article I linked. I read it on Ars, too, but decided to link to the original source.



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zarx on 21 September 2012

One thing to keep in mind, it's a lot easier to upgrade a GPU than a CPU especially across generations, as that will often mean a new Mobo and RAM. So it can be worth investing a bit more in the CPU and then upgrading the GPU in 2-3 years.



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rubido on 23 September 2012
pezus said:
disolitude said:
pezus said:
disolitude said:

I am going to take this challenge on and test Skyrim on a Phenom X4 and i5 with a GTX 670. 

Cool. Make sure to come back and report your findings!


I just noticed something in that Toms Hardware review of Skyrim for CPU requirements... 

"This game clearly relies on CPU power, and you need a Sandy Bridge-based Core i3 at 3 GHz or a Phenom II at 3.5 GHz to provide a minimum 30 FPS. Bear in mind that we're using the ultra detail setting here, and processing requirements drop significantly as you start stepping back. So, you can make due with a less potent chip when you dial in detail options appropriately."

Well yeah, lowering settings to high from ultra should make this run 60fps+ on most CPU platforms. Also I'm sure using Ultra detail on 3 monitors will again hit my GPU bottleneck before the CPU.

So I think my point stands. :)

Ultra or nothing!!

I lol'ed really hard at this comment.

Great comment. Would read again.



disolitude on 24 September 2012
pezus said:
disolitude said:

I am going to take this challenge on and test Skyrim on a Phenom X4 and i5 with a GTX 670. 

Cool. Make sure to come back and report your findings!

So I tried Skyrim on my Phenom 940 and there is a definite CPU bottleneck.

It's still playable (40-50 fps at max settings) but when I keep in mind that my CPU is overclocked like crazy, I can see why some AMD owners would be dissapointed. 

I may look in to upgrading my rig shortly to be honest. lol...



Lusche on 24 September 2012

but to be fair the phenoms are only $50-80 (depends on which one you choose)
you wont get that performance from any intel cpu for that price range.

for an i5 you have to pay like ~$170, but you will notice the difference.
most amd users know that. but there are some delusional amd users who think it can compete against a cpu 3x expensive than their own ...

but for most things a phenom would be enough (not counting the newer amd ones since they arent that good), but it still has its limitation.



disolitude on 24 September 2012
Lusche said:
but to be fair the phenoms are only $50-80 (depends on which one you choose)
you wont get that performance from any intel cpu for that price range.

for an i5 you have to pay like ~$170, but you will notice the difference.
most amd users know that. but there are some delusional amd users who think it can compete against a cpu 3x expensive than their own ...

but for most things a phenom would be enough (not counting the newer amd ones since they arent that good), but it still has its limitation.


New AMD chips are good for some things, but not gaming right out of the box... Very few games utilize more than 4 cores and most are still using 2, so an 8 core processor is like an FX 8120 clocked at 3.1 GHZ is going to be at a disadvantage.

The good news for FX owners is that they overclock extremely well. Me and a friend of mine took his FX 8120 all the way to 4.5 ghz on a 40 dollar air cooler and its stable as a rock. At that clock speed it was slightly faster than my 3.7 Ghz overclocked Phenom for gaming, and much much faster for any multi-threaded application.

I may make a thread one of these days about how to maximize the AMD FX series CPUs as there are some tricks to it.