GPU and CPU Bound Games List

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OldM3ta

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 6, 2004
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Is there a website out there that shows you a list of what games are CPU bound and what games are GPU bound?
 
Considering that depends on the users hardware and preferred settings, I would hazard a guess at no and if it does exist, it would be useless for the above reasons.
 
I mean, my setup for about 3 months was an i7 930 with a HD4350... and the CPU did power my way thorugh Starcraft 2 :p


Necrophile is correct, setups very way too far to make an effective list. One can make a list based off of a predefined "stocK" review model, though that would take an insane amount of work, and testing (need to teak at least 4 times:
weak CPU, strong GPU
weak CPU, weak GPU
strong CPU, strong GPU
strong CPU, weak GPU

just to ensure the results are accurate. And even so, results my vary if it's a TWIMTBP game running on a HD5870 vs a GTX460...).
 
You can't make a list like that, it depends on what hardware you're using for your CPU and GPU, and what video settings you pick.

I always think of it this way.

CPU - The game demands a certain amount of CPU time to generate each frame, generally speaking this only depends on 2 factors, how demanding the game is on the CPU and how good the CPU is

GPU - The game demands a certain amount of GPU time to generate each frame, while it generally relies on 2 similar factors, GPU speed and how demanding the game is, the actual demand for the game can wildly vary depending on the settings you use. For example 800x600 is significantly less demanding than 2560x1600.

The way I work it out in my head is to break it down into these 2 factors. Firstly the CPU, lets assume that we have infinite graphics processing speed, what sort of frame rate would a given CPU achieve in a given game. For example say a i7 3GHZ CPU Playing Metro2033 would get 500fps.

Now think of the opposite situation, assume that we have infinite CPU speed, pick a specific graphics card and a specific game at some predetermined settings. For example lets say Metro2033 again, with a 5870 and 2560x1600 and without any kind of CPU bottleneck we achieve 10fps.

The actual speed you'll get in game with these 2 components will be the lowest of these 2 values (roughly). So 500fps capable CPU and 10fps capable GPU would result in only 10fps in game. In this example you would say that the game (and by "game" you really mean your "system") is GPU limited.

However as you tweak your video settings, the demand on the GPU changes, if we ran the same game on the same hardware and dropped the video settings to 800x600 and set all the video settings to the lowest possible, we might find that (assuming infinite CPU speed) that our video card is actually capable of 600fps.

Then we'd have a case where the same game, on the same hardware was now CPU limited. Now you can see why such a list isn't possible.

Keep in mind that it's not really quite as simple as this, it's really just an approximation of what is going on when we talk about being CPU or GPU bound, there are all sorts of little exceptions, sometimes some game settings do alter CPU load such as options for varying quality in physics calculated on the CPU (usually quite rare to have this option). There is also other considerations like increased load on the CPU from the video card drivers, generally this is minimal though.

This idea of assuming an infinite GPU speed to measure theoretical maximum CPU speed, an vice versa, this is derived from hardware reviews, when comparing CPU speeds in game benchmarks the video settings are always set to minumum to attempt to remove any bottleneck from the graphics card, it means the graphics card is rendering at some arbitrarily high speed which is as close as we can get to infinity in the real world. And vice versa, when benchmarking video cards often reviewers will use the highest possible CPU they can get (sometimes overclocked) to remove any CPU bottleneck.

Sorry if that's information overload :p
 
All games can technically be GPU and CPU constrained, it's just some games make more use of CPU than GPU. The basic guideline for telling which is more important/relied upon more is 1) if there is a lot being drawn on screen, it's GPU 2) if there are a lot of calculation-heavy processes like AI or Physx or stats, it's CPU
 
Toms made a series of articles looking to address this a few months ago. But yeah, it's kind of hard to test. It depends very much on the hardware you run, as well as the resolution and settings you play with.
 
This is a ton of great information, and some funny responses. Thanks to PrincessFrosty for that wonderful post, too. No such thing as becoming too educated. Cheers to my [H] peeps.

Imagine a website that could have the resources to dissect the major game releases in that manner, though. Use a combination of hardware and software setups to tell you what hardware is needed to get the most of out of game, and when some hardware does nothing for you. Now, imagine being able to scroll through a list of games, highlighting the ones you want to play, and the system aggregating such prior information into a summed response of exactly the hardware to get for the resolution you'd be playing at.

Now imagine pigs flying... peace on Earth... and no taxes....
 
ryken said:
CPU Bound:

WoW
Valve Games
GTA4

GPU Bound:

Everything else
Click to expand...

I doubled my frame rates in GTA4 when I upgraded my CPU, then doubled my frame rates again when I upgraded my GPU. So I think it's limited by both. ;)

It's very subjective though. You are a lot more likely to be CPU limited running GTX580 SLI than running a 8800GT.

One game I would put distinctly in the CPU-limited category is Flight Simulator X, but it's basically limited to clock speed and performance per mhz, since it only uses 2 cores.
 
ryken said:
CPU Bound:

WoW
Valve Games
GTA4
BFBC2

GPU Bound:

Everything else
Click to expand...

added a game to your list.

travbrad said:
I doubled my frame rates in GTA4 when I upgraded my CPU, then doubled my frame rates again when I upgraded my GPU. So I think it's limited by both. ;)

It's very subjective though. You are a lot more likely to be CPU limited running GTX580 SLI than running a 8800GT.

One game I would put distinctly in the CPU-limited category is Flight Simulator X, but it's basically limited to clock speed and performance per mhz, since it only uses 2 cores.
Click to expand...

thats because you were video memory limited if you doubled your performance with a gpu upgrade in GTA4.
 
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