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Jizz_Beard_thePirate said:

Pemalite said:

With Ray Tracing CPU's can make a catastrophic difference, especially if the game is using Path Tracing or better... Especially if the game is using bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) which requires a heavy level of threading.

Either way, people choose the CPU's they choose based on a variety of factors, but there is definitely obvious benefits having a heavier threaded CPU with modern games as they are today, even if we ignore the future benefits.

And yes, streaming can be done on the GPU, but that isn't always the best option as some games may use the encoder/decoder for the games built in cinematic and often the CPU (Based on settings) can provide higher quality output for Twitch streams.

Yes Ray Tracing and Path Tracing can certainly impact CPU performance but there are a few important things to point out...

First in the link that you yourself have provided, you can see that the difference between 5800X "modified" and 5950X is only 1.5 FPS when running Cyberpunk with Ray Tracing. The only reason the 5800X shows modified is because at the time, there was a known bug with Ryzen and Cyberpunk where the game didn't use all of the threads for 6 and 8 core cpus. So Toms hardware according to the article applied a fix so that it will show the true scaling which really isn't much.

Second if you look at a more modern tests with modern CPUs such as 7700X vs 7950X and games like Alan Wake 2, you can see that 8 vs 16 cores really aren't making much of a difference. In fact thanks to Vcache with 5800X3D, it is able to gain more frames than a cpu with 16 cores like 5950x. I posted 720p to get rid of any potential gpu bottlenecks but they also have 1080p tests:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d/17.html

And third, lets say instead of getting a 5950X which had an MSRP of $800, they got a 5800X which had an MSRP of $450 and used that $350 to towards a GPU and they already had a fixed budget of $300 since that is basically the barrier to entry. So instead of getting stuck with a 3060 or 6600. They could have gotten either a 3080 ($700 msrp) or 6800XT ($650 msrp).

So basically in gaming, a person could have gotten an increase of 50% in performance in games if they put that money towards a GPU instead of doubling the cores and gotten one hell of a return if they sold it at the right time. Granted cryto shat on everyone 3 months after those gpus launched but you know, in theory and all that. But you could apply the logic with modern cpus too. 9950x msrp is $650 and 9700x msrp is $350. 9070 XT ($600) is $250 more expensive than a 9060 XT 16GB ($350) and will give around 50% increase in gaming performance.

Keep in mind, I am not saying it's wrong to buy a more expensive cpu over gpu. Everyones use case is different as you said. But for general gaming, I'd always recommend putting more money towards a gpu over a cpu.

Just to add to this, most publishers build their engines around the weakest non-portable console of the time, which would currently be the Xbox series S. As long as the series S is still taken into account, the vast majority of titles won't make use of more than 6 cores/12 threads.