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[JEMC]

Captain_Yuri said:

JEMC said:

See my comment below.

Bofferbrauer2 said:

It's not pointless at all. It's about future-proofing your hardware.

While currently GPUs are not powerful enough to not be the limiting factor, future GPUs very well will be. So if you can't or won't upgrade your CPU but the GPU instead you can see how high the FPS could be if the GPU is not the limiting factor anymore.

I understand why they do this kind of test, but the same benchmark could be done at 720p with no further tricks (or 480p for some of those handheld gaming PCs) and, since no current (or from the last couple of gens) high-end cards will be GPU limited at that resolution, still get the useful results.

No because 720p still has a GPU bottleneck for certain games like this. It's why people at Anandtech has some benchmarks at 360p and others at 720p. Some games even with modern GPUs can still bottleneck high end CPUs like the 5950x.

"We use the same scene for the CPU benchmarks as for the graphics cards. Days Gone is so well optimized that even processors many years old deliver three-digit frame rates. We therefore had to work really hard to be able to generate a CPU limit at all. To do this, we used the render scaling and turned it down to ten percent. At a resolution of 1,280 × 720, this corresponds - exactly - to a cute 128 × 72 = 9,216 pixels. Nobody plays in this resolution, that is clear to us. Nevertheless, we have to create a CPU limit in this way in order to work out the performance of the processors. In this way, we also challenge the frame times more, which are responsible for the perceived playability."

If they did the test at 720p, while it would still show a result that follows the same pattern such as 5950x > 5900x > 5600x > i7 11700k etc, it wouldn't be able to show you how much of a lead Ryzen 5000 CPUs have until you fully get rid of the GPU bottleneck.

Just for curiosity, how many games can actually do that? I mean, maybe Star Citizen could, but that's still work in progress, and maybe Flight Simulator, but I can't think of any game that could cause a bottleneck at 720p with all the settings set to low (after all, all the setting would be set to the lowest possible to put the pressure onto the CPU, right?).