By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
disolitude on 20 September 2012
Edit Thread
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.