Upgrade to Devils Canyon

I've always been in the camp that a fast 4 core i5 is more than enough for a good gaming experience. After recently upgrading my 4670k to a 4790k I've now changed my mind.

Metro Last Light has always stuttered badly for me. I tried every solution I could find on the net with no luck. Then on a whim I decided to grab a 4790k for no particular reason. Lo and behold the stuttering is completely gone.

Ran across this interview with the developer where the game may stutter on 4 core CPUs. Ironically I never found this article before when I was searching for the fix. I also didn't see any evidence of this stutter or low minimums in any of the benchmark reviews of Last Light.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/multi-core-cpu-scaling-directx-11,4768-4.html

We can run on a dual-thread CPU, but in this case there is already internal oversubscription, which causes lower framerate and stutter. Realistically, a quad-threaded CPU is the minimum for us, with eight-thread CPUs vastly preferred.

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In the end this is just one game and the stutter could have been a combination of multiple things in my system but the additional 4 threads seems to have fixed it completely. Thought I'd share for others out there who are still on the fence about the benefits of more cores/threads.

4670k 60fps cap - major stutter and minimums ~10fps




4790k 60fps cap - no stutter and minimums locked at 60fps

This has pretty much been the case with newer games.

Average framerate isn't affected so much, but the 1% and <1% lows are.

I also noticed less stutter/lag with my 3700X vs the 4770K @ 4.2-4.3, using the same GPU. Board and RAM are obviously different.

It has been that way the last 4 years at least ..

4c/8t has always been a superior gaming experiencie over just 4c CPU's specially dor high refresh rate users who aim to achieve aa higher minimum as posible, for us who have first hand experience it's always easier to tell others about how better the smoothness and game response its but there are always some stubborn guys who still have the balls to think and say 4c it's enough when that's not the case.

I've been fighting that scenario since I bought my old i7 3770k and i7 6700k versus guys thinking i5 was more than enough.

For many years, a good quad core provided more than enough power for a solid gaming experience. However, more recent games can reach into around 6 to 8 threads. As a result, the Core i7 9700K hangs with the Core i9 9900K in gaming. In some rare instances, it's actually faster than the Core i9 9900K as Hyperthreading actually hurts performance in some rare cases.

Araxie said:

It has been that way the last 4 years at least ..

4c/8t has always been a superior gaming experiencie over just 4c CPU's specially dor high refresh rate users who aim to achieve aa higher minimum as posible, for us who have first hand experience it's always easier to tell others about how better the smoothness and game response its but there are always some stubborn guys who still have the balls to think and say 4c it's enough when that's not the case.

I've been fighting that scenario since I bought my old i7 3770k and i7 6700k versus guys thinking i5 was more than enough.

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It does help to have a deep Steam backlog. I'm still playing games from 2012-2014 so it'll be a while before I'm into the really heavy multi-threaded stuff. Right now I'm working through Mass Effect 3 and Metro. Hopefully the 4970k can keep up for another year or two.

MangoSeed said:

It does help to have a deep Steam backlog. I'm still playing games from 2012-2014 so it'll be a while before I'm into the really heavy multi-threaded stuff. Right now I'm working through Mass Effect 3 and Metro. Hopefully the 4970k can keep up for another year or two.

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I can assure you that you won't have any issues with ME3. I played that with a [email protected] and a Radeon 5770 with no issues.