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How important are CPUs for gaming?
While the GPU takes a lot of the limelight for gaming performance, your CPU actually plays a critical role in the performance of modern games too. It may not actually render anything, but it is responsible for lining up what will be shown on screen and in games with a lot of complicated computational processes (like when you have lots of independently moving soldiers) the CPU is doing the heavy lifting in working out where all those bits need to be.
There’s two important factors in how good a CPU will be for gaming: clock speed and the number of cores. Depending on the specific game you are running one or both of these factors could be a critical component. As a minimum, modern games require a quad-core CPU. This is primarily because games have to be optimised for use with particular kinds of hardware and so most developers will aim for a balance that allows the game to be run well on the broadest range of architecture. Quad-core is really the minimum you can get away with on modern games to do them justice.
Many developers however, are keen to show off their games capabilities and will build them with performance that scales alongside CPU power. Battlefield V, for example, will run 32.9% better on a hexa-core chip than a quad-core one, and if you have an octa-core CPU at the same clock speed it’ll offer 40.5% better framerates using an Nividia RTX 2080 and 16GB RAM configuration. This is 57fps and 79fps better respectively using 1080p settings, so it can make a noticeable difference to your games, especially at high framerates.
There isn’t too much information on which games scale better with more cores, but it’s generally a safe bet to say that strategy games like Total War titles utilise multithreading and will perform better, but Rainbow Six Siege, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Hitman 2, GTA 5, and The Witcher 3, are all known to scale to varying degrees with higher CPU core counts up to a peak of eight. We couldn’t find any games that benefited more than around a few percent from having a total of 10 or 12 cores running. This may change as developers begin to design games for higher core-count CPUs, but for now there’s not much benefit to gaming performance.
While the titles we’ve looked at above are designed in a way to utilise multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs, it’s fair to say that the vast majority of games still rely primarily on a single optimised thread to do the majority of in-game processing, while palming off smaller tasks to at most a few other CPU cores/ threads. This means that a higher clock speed will have a greater impact on the largest number of games than overall core count. It is this simple fact that allows Intel to keep a competitive edge against AMD when it comes to gaming (even though AMD convincingly outperforms Intel in general processing tasks for similarly priced CPUs). This means that Intel’s latest i7’s and i9’s are around 9% faster than AMD’s when using an Nvidia graphics card (the difference is negligible when using a Radeon GPU), even though they offer 20-25% less raw computing performance generally.
It’s also worth remembering that CPU performance is more likely to affect games running at high framerates (100+ fps) than high resolutions, so the best CPU for you will really depend on the types of games you prefer to play.
“We couldn’t find any games that benefited more than around a few percent from having a total of 10 or 12 cores running.”