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

[zarx]

disolitude said:

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.

Straight console ports tend to be CPU bound, most likely as cyrrent consoles actually have pretty powerful CPUs compaired to their GPUs. They tend to do things like shadow rendering on the CPU where a PC focuesed game will put everything possible on the GPU. Sonic generations likely isn't scalling to all the cores properly you saw that in a lot of console ports early this gen where they would scale to 2 threads perfect but past that it will just alocate 2 threads of work over more cores so on a 4 core CPU you will get each core at arround 50-60% utilization on each core. It is pretty weired.

An example I found of the behaviour, and that game is CPU bound.

 

 I imagine the new SimCity game will be heavily CPU bound as well so there is reasons for a gamer to have a good CPU going forward. Also Sleeping Dogs is pretty good, it's set in Hong Kong.