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by overcast 2545 days ago
I think people get a little over zealous with CPU requirements on games. If my eight year old Xeon 5676 can handle every past and present game I throw at it, I think you'll be beyond spec for years to come with a Zen 2(or any modern processor).
1 comments

it depends a lot on the type of game and what you care about for that type of game.

if you're playing a AAA singleplayer game, the GPU will almost certainly be the bottleneck. any i5/i7 tier CPU from the last eight years will be powerful enough not to starve the GPU most of the time. when I play this sort of game, I mostly just care about the average framerate. I don't care too much if every 10-15 minutes a complex scene causes a brief stutter. if this is the only kind of game I played, I would just get a cheap midrange processor (unless I had requirements due to unrelated workloads).

on the other hand, when I play a fast-paced multiplayer game (especially fps), I care a lot more about worst case framerates than average. in a game like counterstrike, framerate drops tend to happen when there are smokes, flashes, and/or multiple players onscreen simultaneously. in other words, they happen in the most important moments of the game! while I'm happy to average around 45-60 fps in the witcher, I want the minimum in csgo to be no less than 120. if you have a goal like this, even an old source engine game becomes pretty demanding.

there are also games like factorio where the simulation itself is difficult or impossible to split into multiple threads. singlethreaded performance and memory bandwidth set an upper bound to how big your base can be while still having a playable game.

I suppose if your goal is 100+ fps that's probably valid for high fidelity multiplayer games like battlefield, but there is no way even an ancient CPU can't handle games like CSGO at many multiples of that. I value real estate and image quality, so my panels are 30" and IPS. Which means I'm limited to 60fps. However if I unsync, the framerate is in the 150 range in Overwatch. This is on a gtx 1070 with ALL settings maxed at 2560x1600.
keep in mind I'm talking about 99th percentile frames. I'm running a 4670k right now which easily gets over 250 fps most of the time in csgo. with multiple players, flashes, smokes, and weapon animations on screen, it can drop down to around 70. it's hard for me to notice this visually, but it does make the input feel weird.
Well for the rest of us, old CPUs do just fine in 99.99999% of cases :) RAM is cheap, and a good GPU is really all that matters at this point.