Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by user5994461 3397 days ago
Pretty much all games are CPU intensive and it's not getting better.

Try running on a cheap i3 from a few years ago and you'll understand your pain quickly.

3 comments

AdoredTV has a pretty objective video on this subject[1]. TL;DW he expects it to move past Intel perf in the future - based on how an older AMD chip is now beating a then-better Intel chip.

My opinion: if Microsoft is able to pivot the Scorpio over to the Ryzen (or indeed, any CPU with more than 4C/8T) it will drastically alter the lowest common denominator in terms of what game developerss target - i.e. we'll see games moving towards more modern threading architectures (e.g. futures/jobs as-per Star Citizen, which more thoroughly exploit CPU resources).

Furthermore, there is hearsay evidence that supports AMDs claims. Ashes of the Singularity currently runs better on Intel but the developers claim:

[2]> Oxide games is incredibly excited with what we are seeing from the Ryzen CPU. Using our Nitrous game engine, we are working to scale our existing and future game title performance to take full advantage of Ryzen and its 8-core, 16-thread architecture, and the results thus far are impressive.

In addition to that, if you look at the CPU usage/saturation alongside the benchmarks (13:08 in [1]) it's strikingly obvious that the CPU is not the bottleneck - Intel is upwards of 90% on all cores while the Ryzen hovers around ~60%. I'm holding my credit card close until the aforementioned optimizations and rumored bios patches land, but I'm willing to give AMD a little benefit of the doubt - what we're seeing largely matches what they are saying.

[1]: https://youtu.be/ylvdSnEbL50 [2]: http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-launch-aftermath-gaming-perfor...

Sorry but for years the mantra was for a gaming pic to invest in a i5 or even an i3 and spend the extra money in a good GPU. But for some bizarre reason suddenly everything that is not performing as an i7 7770k is a "bad cpu for gaming". It's ridiculous.

Hell in 30 million households there are 8 jaguar x86 core gaming machines active now with an IPC that is probably (I assume) atrocious.

I build my i7 4770 4 years ago and the sad part is that it will probably still take a lot of time for it to become a bottleneck in 90% of the games.

If you check Digital Foundry's excellent i5 vs i7 benchmarks, if building a machine to game on you want 8 threads minimum today. Times have indeed changed on the old i5 recommendation.

That said, completely tangential to what you're saying. Ryzen may (at worst) perform like an i5 in gaming but it has more than 8 threads. I do everything with my machine and going with a R7 1700 overclocked.

I use a FX8730E and they only bottleneck that I have it's my old GTX660 GPU.
CPU intensive != single threaded