[notTheAuth]

“Enthusiast” CPUs seem pointless. My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games as it’s all on the GFX card now.

Good to see CPUs going through the great decoupling that software did.

IMO Steamdeck is the future of home desktops. Both my kids are into science; I’m excited to have a drone remote, sensor base station, generic pc, etc, in a high quality package versus something like Pine phone.

Valve and Apple are pushing hardware forward. Hopefully they can obsolete needing data centers of generic CPUs and tons of Byzantine software by making hardware with the best logic for a task built in, available to home users.

[GhettoComputers]

Just a question about gaming. I haven't really seen any good AAA games worth playing anymore. The GPUs and CPUs have great capabliities but I don't see any good games anymore that make buying the hardware worth it anymore. Most of the games that are good I am interested in don't need good hardware. Do you feel the same trend when you play games?

[Someone]

I don’t know whether it applies to you, and don’t even know whether it’s true, but I think that may have less to do with new games being worse than with you being older and/or having seen more games. Getting older makes people less inclined to be obsessed with games, and having seen more games decreases the chance of a new game being an outlier, and outliers attract attention.

I think this applies to other fields, too. Watch your umptieth Super Bowl, and chances are you will think back to the ‘better’ one you saw when you were young. Twenty years from now, the kids watching their first one now will say the same about this one.

[GhettoComputers]

I don't completely disagee, but the point is that games haven't really gotten better, gameplay hasn't improved for many games (look at Cyberpunk 2077), there are more and more HD remakes since they aren't making new good games that excite people (SC2 was never as loved as SC1 same with Diablo 2 vs 3), and graphics have improved but gameplay has not. I think Nintendo is the most consistent with good new games but thats not really relevant to PC gaming.

[ThatMedicIsASpy]

Well Nintendo titles usually receive the best kind of HD upgrades on PC. Modders have even created a PC only DLC for Breath of the Wild.

[GhettoComputers]

"Best HD upgrades" is just because the default is upscaled, older consoles like the Dreamcast had amazing HD PC upgrades too (probably since the default resolution was 640 x 480, the emulated BoTW on the Wii U was 720p). Very interesting DLC, is it just the WiiU verison or switch version?

[notTheAuth]

Yeah I think that’s a side effect of knowing how the sausage is made.

I have written my own ECS loops, rendering pipelines; all naive but after that it’s optimizing to product fit, and product emotional themes are pretty copy-paste to satisfy social memes.

[GhettoComputers]

They still occasionally come out but it’s rare. I haven’t been happy with an AAA game aside from Prey recently (2017 as “recent”) and Cyberpunk 2077 was all hype and no substance. I think they’re running out of new interesting games (Paradox, and Arkane are still good studios though) and many games I’m intrigued by are just remakes.

Starcraft Remastered, AoE II HD, System Shock, the Halo collection for instance, the Homeworld remake didn’t even interest me since I heard it was worst in some ways with hit boxes. They also don’t need new graphics cards. It’s so different from when PC hardware upgrades and games were so much more closely coupled.

[staticman2]

Sony has started to port prestige first party PlayStation games like Horizon Zero Dawn to pc. If you like that sort of thing it's worth checking out...

[Apocryphon]

Feels like we've hit a plateau in terms of graphics for nearly a decade now in terms of "good enough" or "realistic enough."

[GhettoComputers]

I haven't been excited for graphics since Crysis in 2008, nothing after that was very impressive in comparison.

[shadowfacts]

> My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games

That just means your GPU is the bottleneck, not that the CPU couldn't be utilized more.

[jbboehr]

Basically all of my favorite games get worse simulation performance (FPS or UPS) the longer you play as the simulation becomes more complex (Factorio, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Kerbal Space Program, Stellaris) so the performance is absolutely desired.

[omni]

There are plenty of games that actually use CPU: Microsoft Flight Simulator, Factorio, Stellaris, Total War, pretty much any city simulator game, etc. Sure, your average dumb AAA action game won't, but that doesn't mean a good CPU is worthless.

[GhettoComputers]

Factorio isn't stressing 8 core CPUs. Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.

[riversflow]

lol! Stellaris can be played on a laptop, but try ramping the Galaxy size up to 1000 and/or increase the habitable planet multiplier. You get a couple hundred years in and the game just crawls even on nice hardware. Its not unplayable, its a strategy game, but the pace definitely slows down a lot, and space battles aren't as fun to watch.

By the same token you can play virtually any game on a cheap gaming rig. Just put all the graphics on low, run it at 720p and be happy with 20 fps.

[GhettoComputers]

Most games don't need the latest or greatest hardware to run well, there's a lack of good AAA games that make the value proposition of new hardware much less appealing versus the days of wanting to build a computer to play Crysis.

[dragontamer]

Endgame Factorio stresses CPUs because rocket-per-minute bases are a thing.

1 RPM is where a mega base starts. Stronger players can do 20 RPM (yes, a rocket every 3 seconds).

In those conditions, your CPU becomes the limit to the RPM as your game starts to slow down

[omni]

> Stellaris can be played on a laptop. You are confirming his conclusion that they don't need a strong CPU to play.

Movies can be watched on phones. Does that mean theater screens are pointless?

[GhettoComputers]

Just look at the attendance of movies or how often phones are used for videos.

[notTheAuth]

With different software pipelines they could run right on a GPU

It’s all state in a machine, and ML is showing us recursion + memory accomplish a lot; why all the generic structure in x86 if we can prove our substrate works just as well with better power efficiency if it’s structured specifically?

Chips aren’t concepts, they’re coupled to physics; simplify the real geometry. I think that’s what Apple is really proving with its chips, and why Intel is trying to become a foundry; they realize their culture can only extend x86 and x86 comes from another era of manufacturing.

I got into tech designing telecom hardware for mass production in the late-90 and early-00s. I just code now but still follow manufacturing, and have friends that work in fabs all over; this is just sort of a summary of the trends we see shrug emoji

[GhettoComputers]

Is that a realistic goal to run all on GPU? Nvidia wants ARM to make GPU/CPUs together. The idea is as intriguing as making games that are OS independent and just run bare metal by making them with ISAs. I don’t think there’s games that do that.

[skocznymroczny]

If it's all on the GFX card, why is there a performance difference in games between Intel and AMD CPUs?

[theevilsharpie]

When testing games, CPU reviews tend to test reduced resolutions and quality settings with the highest-end GPU they have, as a means of highlighting the differences between the CPUs.

While there aren't any nefarious intentions on behalf of the reviewer, this approach runs into the following problems:

- People buying high-end GPUs are unlikely to be running at resolutions of 1080p or below (or at lower quality settings), and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- People buying lower-end GPUs are going to be GPU-bottlenecked, and won't see as much (if any) performance difference between CPUs as what reviewers show.

- Each frame being rendered needs to be set up, animated, sent to the GPU for display, etc., and like all workloads, there's going to be portions that can't be effectively parallelized. As such, the higher the frame rate, the more likely the game is to be bottlenecked by single-threaded performance, which is an area where Intel CPUs have traditionally been strong relative to AMD's. However, as frames get more complex and take longer to render, the CPU has more of an opportunity to perform that work in parallel, and raw computational throughput is an area where AMD's modern CPUs have been strong relative to Intel's. So just because a CPU has leading performance in games today, doesn't necessarily mean that will hold in the future as game worlds become more complex (and reviewers revisiting the performance of 2017-era AMD Zen 1 vs. Intel Kaby Lake in recently-released titles have already started seeing this).

In short, the way that reviewers test CPU performance in games results in the tests being artificial and not really reflective of what most end users would actually experience.

After all, a graph showing nearly identical CPU performance across the lineup and the reviewer concluding, "yep, still GPU-limited," doesn't make for an interesting article/video.