10-Core Processors Are Still "Totally Overkill" for Gaming

Megalith

Megalith

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PC Gamer is pooping on the Skylake-X and Threadripper party by urging prospective buyers to forget about them if their main intent is gaming. The author tested the 10-core/20-thread i9-7900X against the 4-core/8-thread Core i7-7740X and found that the latter was bested only once. He insists that gamers should go even lower with an i5-7600K, calling it the best bang for the buck. My thought is to get the best you can afford, as your rig could be up for more intensive tasks at any time.

...what can I tell you about gaming performance right now? Try this on for size: in the sixteen games I tested (charts will be coming later this week, along with a full review of Core i9-7900X and Core i7-7740X), there is only one game where the 10-core/20-thread CPU beats the 4-core/8-thread CPU—and not by a large margin. On the other hand, there are two games where the 4-core/8-thread part delivers a noteworthy victory. In other words, the two chips are basically tied for gaming performance. The difference? One costs $325, and the other costs $999.
 
Moral of the story is: Purchase with your brain kids.. and not your penis :)

I utterly and totally detest this "gotta keep up with the newest, latest & greatest" mentality so many outlets and sites perpetuate
 
When they are testing game performance, if they don't have a browser window open and TeamSpeak connected to a server with at least two young men under the age of 20 yapping on it, then they are not doing a complete test.

Just saying :rolleyes:

EDIT: And you should probably be playing some good tunes as well, for those who have that preference.
 
When I'm playing BeamNG Drive and have spawned 8+ vehicles is the only time I wish I had more than 4 cores.
 
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Wait you mean processors made for productivity are not better at gaming/better gaming value....mind blown.....

Eventually developers will be able to utilize more cores/threads it just isn't now. My CPU's last 6-8 years so any new build will factor that in.

The only gaming use case I could see is if you are streaming to multiple services (youtube/twitch) while on the same box. It would be better to have a dedicated streaming box but if that isn't an option then a 10+ core cpu would be your best option.
 
Seventyfive said:
The one thing that they do have is a crap ton of PCIe lanes. The idea of having 3x Ultra M.2 slots is pretty attractive.
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Again still pretty useless over having a NVMe drive when it comes to gaming. Productivity and server space yes it is but gaming no. Not to mention at this point SLI/CF is on its way out.
 
I bought a dual Xeon setup with a Quatro GPU. Doesn't play Crysis... :( (I'm not serious with that....).

It's not just for gaming. Like others have said - if you're using it strictly for gaming, you're just showing your e-peen.

Do I want one? Fuck yea. Would I get one for a gaming rig? No. It'd be awesome to have, awesome to play with. I wouldn't use it to it's potential. Not even close. I'd be pissing money away. But, it'd be cool to own if I got it for free or really cheap.
 
Well i am waiting for the video encoding while playing crysis benches. In seriousness I can envision a future where the desktop is just a box that streams wirelessly to monitors and tablets.. 2 or more people could be gaming or surfing the desktop become more of a local server for computing in the house.
 
Games arent optimized for multi-core, multi-thread right NOW...that will change as these chips become commonplace. I am not buying a PC just for the software I am running RIGHT NOW, but what I will most likely be running over the next 5 years or so...and as such, from experience, I ALWAYS buy a little higher end than is mainstream...because what is rare and exotic now will be common in a couple years!
 
Uvaman2 said:
Well i am waiting for the video encoding while playing crysis benches. In seriousness I can envision a future where the desktop is just a box that streams wirelessly to monitors and tablets.. 2 or more people could be gaming or surfing the desktop become more of a local server for computing in the house.
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Not until they figure a way to do it with ZERO latency! High end PC gaming always has been about pushing the envelope, getting the absolute BEST performance from your games...and introducing lag into the experience just wont fly for most PC gamers.
 
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jnemesh said:
Games arent optimized for multi-core, multi-thread right NOW...that will change as these chips become commonplace. I am not buying a PC just for the software I am running RIGHT NOW, but what I will most likely be running over the next 5 years or so...and as such, from experience, I ALWAYS buy a little higher end than is mainstream...because what is rare and exotic now will be common in a couple years!
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I heard the same thing when I bought my core 2 duo regarding the quads. Here I am like 15 years later still using only two cores at a time - one for the game and another for everything else.
 
This all seems like a no-brainer....remember when dual core started? No games made use of both cores. Same when quads came out.

If you rather keep your money, be happy with a quad and wait until buying more cores is worthwhile. I know I'll be waiting for history to repeat itself.
 
The thing is, people say games aren't optimized for multi-core yet there are definitely games that are optimized for multi-core and if one of those is your go to entertainment, i suggest you buy appropriately.
 
Chicken, meet egg.

If you want any progress to be made, one side has to give in and go first:
  • Make the hardware available and accessible. Consumers buy the hardware to be ahead of the curve or are forced to buy "more than they need" by not giving them the option. That way they are ready for when software will become available, thus showing developers there is interest in the market to develop for said hardware. This could, initially, raise the cost of investment. Or...
  • The developers should entice the hardware market to move by developing software that can't be fully taken advantage of unless newer hardware is made and sold to the public. May come across as limiting the "out of the box" experience since you will have to wait for hardware to be available to allow the software/game to fully perform. Then once the hardware does become available, is the software/game still viable or is it now antiquated in the current market?
There are pros and cons to each side as to who should move first. But doing this stalemate crap gets old quick.
 
jnemesh said:
Not until they figure a way to do it with ZERO latency! High end PC gaming always has been about pushing the envelope, getting the absolute BEST performance from your games...and introducing lag into the experience just wont fly for most PC gamers.
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Agreed.. part of why streaming games, may not really take off, but something like what im saying might work.. the kick ass computer is just like a big cache.. i mean since really we are moving to never really owning software... Might as well do it better.. i think this would give desktops and very very powerful ones at that the central place they belong to.
 
lcpiper said:
The thing is, people say games aren't optimized for multi-core yet there are definitely games that are optimized for multi-core and if one of those is your go to entertainment, i suggest you buy appropriately.
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Yes, we're finally seeing games trickling out that properly take advantage of more than 2 cores. Back then it was people in the mainstream complaining that there 7 year old single core processor couldn't play games. It's now switched to the various hardware instruction sets. Either way, it's the plebeians holding the advancement back in the software when compared to the hardware available.
 
James Robinson said:
Moral of the story is: Purchase with your brain kids.. and not your penis :)
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I don't know. I think the people that listen to their penis have a bit more fun in life. :p


That said, I'm still running a 4690K and GTX1070 for games, and haven't seen a single reason to go any further YET. I'll probably upgrade it next year I imagine.
 
run the tests but this time have 100 chrome tabs opend and lots of crap in the background like most of us folks around here do. The extra ram and cores might not help in gaming but its nice to not have to worry about closing stuff to run games at the best speed.
 
tunatime said:
run the tests but this time have 100 chrome tabs opend and lots of crap in the background like most of us folks around here do. The extra ram and cores might not help in gaming but its nice to not have to worry about closing stuff to run games at the best speed.
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Thats what I never see mentioned in a review. That is where 8 cores shine, I can run a few vm's, a ton of chrome tabs, and it still runs great. I am going to keep an eye on this platform and the 10 core part. If it is stable, I will probably jump from my 1800x, as the x370 platform was/is not fully finished . A 7900x with a monoblock would be a great setup.
 
They'll be good for workloads that involve virtual machines, but yeah, I don't think many games will take full advantage of them.

Heck, there's still not a whole lot of apps that do multithreading natively - and the ones that do are sometimes only done for two cores. Look at Chrome, it spawns a new process for every tab/extension, thus making the OS do the multithreading for it by rebalancing the 20 processes it has running. Not exactly a bad approach if you can break your app into many segmented pieces (easier with a browser where it's essentially just a bunch of copies of the same program linked).
 
There is usually a sweet spot in the price curve. Buy higher CPU then the spot and the price really goes up for the small amount of power increase. Buy less and the savings are fairly small for a large decrease in power. Buy enough RAM to fill half the slots. Buy more when your MB's type of RAM is at that really cheap spot just before the new stuff starts becoming popular.
 
Common sense must prevail. 6 cores is overkill for gaming. You don't see a 100% performance increase from a dual core to a quad core. Games are applications that don't benefit from cores a whole lot. This is why Intel is king for gaming, unless Ryzen 2 manages to match their IPC and clocks. Which I doubt; maybe 2-3 years from now Ryzen 2 will be out and maybe match Intel's current IPC. With luck, they can get the CPUs to run slightly higher GHZ.

But, my Ryzen 1600 performances roughly the same as my old 4670K in the benchmarks I've run. So it seems to be decent enough for 1440P.
 
Kongar said:
I heard the same thing when I bought my core 2 duo regarding the quads. Here I am like 15 years later still using only two cores at a time - one for the game and another for everything else.
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Which isn't surprising. One thread is going to handle the main game executable, which honestly doesn't do a ton of processing. The rest is the DirectX Driver backend. And prior to DX12, that was almost entirely single-threaded. Throw in a handful of low-work worker threads, and that pretty much sums up how games are designed as far as threads goes. And while DX12 gives the ability to break up the render thread into smaller units, this gives no tangible performance benefit to CPUs that could already handle that thread single-threaded [note there are GPU performance related reasons to breaking the thread up that are independent of CPU performance].

The main benefit of more cores for gaming purposes is the ability to run more background tasks at the same time, and slightly lower latency [less likely a main game thread gets bumped for a few microseconds].
 
Heck, I'm still waiting for games to utilize the multi-GPU thing that was promised. Would be nice if my system could utilize both my main GPU and the integrated one as well.
 
Well, fun and STDs... and more stories about crazy chicks... in most cases...

In any case, why can't we want it all? Faster PCs and faster software? There was a time when Windows was somewhat speedy and small, fitting on a few diskettes. Now it takes 50 gig, more or less (Winsxs, anyone?)

I would like a small well-written version of windows that runs the games and other programs I play faster than ever before on hardware that is faster than ever before. I'm not asking for much, right?
 
Cantroy said:
Well, fun and STDs... and more stories about crazy chicks... in most cases...

In any case, why can't we want it all? Faster PCs and faster software? There was a time when Windows was somewhat speedy and small, fitting on a few diskettes. Now it takes 50 gig, more or less (Winsxs, anyone?)

I would like a small well-written version of windows that runs the games and other programs I play faster than ever before on hardware that is faster than ever before. I'm not asking for much, right?
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What you just asked for was an xBox .... And I don't know what you have done or have not been doing to your OS install but all the installs I see around here are maybe 30GB after 3 years of use..... Even at 50GB the entire OS and all the millions of drivers and thousands of programs it has built into it are still smaller than pretty much any 1 game you are currently playing.

HDD space consumed is not a good indicator of performance, I would argue that Windows now is far more "optimised" than it has been in the last 20 years.
 
I personally like the sound of these CPUs. I may not need them for gaming 100%. My current CPU is great still. However, I do stream my games to other rooms of the house (Shield TVs) people stream media off it sometimes, I run a few small game servers, (Terraria, MC, and other random stuff for the kids) and occasionally run VMs on it. I think throwing a few more cores at this sounds great. I don't have any pressing need right now, but I think I'll eventually jump to 8 or 10. Up until now, I've always just built more PCs, offloaded this or that to one or the other if needed, and called it good. There's something cool about the thought of having one large host handling things for half of my house though. :D (in a weird, tinkering sort of way anyway)
 
Nauseous said:
buy what you can afford. i would like to have one of them shiny 10 core procs.
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Agree with wanting a 10 core, but disagree with what you can afford. I bought to my needs and saved a ton of cash. If I bought what I could afford I would have wasted a heck of a lot of money for a system I'd use 1/4 of. But, it would have given me serious e-peen. It's doing everything I need it to do fast and 'relatively' cheap.
 
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