[tarpherder]

Big modern games are CPU limited mostly. GPU work can be scaled down very easily (even dynamically!) by reducing the rendering resolution and as such can be made to fit the limits, up to a point. Scaling the CPU side of things is a lot trickier. And although we get an increasing amount of cores in new CPUs, single core performance has not increased in the same way. Some things just don't want to be multi-threaded or must happen in-order. This then becomes the most limiting factor.