How Fast Does Your CPU Need to Be for Gaming?

With Ryzen 3000 about to launch many people wonder whether or not now is the time to upgrade. Using current gen consoles (PS4,) as a baseline we can see CPU demands of today's games really aren't much at all!

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What is theGoodOldGamer?
Hey guys, Chris here with theGoodOldGamer! First off thank you for checking out the video today. In this crazy world of marketing, and spin, I try to keep an old school perspective on the current gaming landscape, and try to show a different side of the conversation.

theGoodOldGamer YT:

[Hardwareunboxed]

Given how poor the frame time performance is in modern games with those lower clocked 6-core Xeons, they aren't going to handle future games very well, which is why I don't advocate investing in those dead platforms. Buying into AM4 using second hand parts seems like a far wiser investment to me. I've posted Phil an R5 1400 and R5 1600 so he can do some updated testing, it will be interesting to see what he comes up with.

[ccallaghan]

Chris, I appreciate where you're trying to go with this. But this theory has a fundamental flaw. Simply put, software. Games on consoles are optimized differently and dont have the same OS/Driver layer to run through to getting output on the screen. Consoles are specific purpose machines and their software reflects that. PCs have so many configurations and need to be adjusted to in a more universal manner. This has impact on frame rendering as it's still the CPUs job the prepare the data for the GPU. Another thing to talk about is latency between when a game asks for some processing, and the result is delivered. Along the way, cache, memory, CPU arch, etc all add to this latency. More complex games like AC and Witcher 3 need faster cpus to keep complex non-graphical game mechanics smoothly.

That said, I've had a 2400G, 1600, and 2700X. The 2400G will bottleneck a system below 60fps on newer titles even with high powered GPUs like a VII. Even shutting off 2 cores on my 1600 dropped games like AC Odyssey significantly. Games are getting more reliant on CPU, so no, advising people that they only need a 2400G for the next few years is somewhat misleading.


I'd be more than happy to collaborate with you and provide real data.

[yurimodin]

used 1st gen Ryzen in 2 weeks will put the nail in the coffin for Sandy Bridge and old Xeon budget

[philscomputerlab]

Nice! I did test some HP Thin Clients with Jaguar cores, and yea, they are pretty weak :D Old games run ok, but anything semi modern struggles a lot! I'm continuing checking out more Xeons, the 1356 platform, at least the boards you can get, are holding the CPUs back a little because of only dual channel RAM vs triple channel that the CPUs support. So I'm looking at 2011 and found that the CPUs there are actually cheaper, so it evens it out a bit, more expensive motherboards, but cheaper CPUs, and super cheap old server RAM. At ~ 3 GHz Ivy Bridge is indeed fast enough for most games to run at 60+ FPS, but does struggle with AC Odyssey, that game is really demanding...

[balbinderful]

Most of the Freesync monitors, even the very cheap ones, are now shipping at 75hz standard refresh rates. So, the entire 60hz thing is kind of dead, because 75hz is now the entry-level refresh rate for Freesync Monitors.

[giserson]

You have to take into consideration how many threads games are optimized to run on, given that current consoles have 8 threads that's what console ports will target, however more demanding games are starting to target even more threads than that to achieve higher framerates on pc. Add to that the API overhead from DX11 (which is still the standard and DX12 implementations are usually not optimized), windows and DRM (especially denuvo) and suddenly you start having a lot of trouble with even a good quad core. This is something that can be seen in real world benchmarks with games like AC Oddysey and BFV, those games can stutter and generally run bad on even an overclocked 4690k or 6600k etc. Some games are even seeing greater and greater differences in framerate between quad core i7s and higher core count cpus, even zen despite it's high latency and low-ish ipc compared to sky/kaby/coffeelake. Right now the minimum for a uninterrupted 60fps experience is 6 cores and prefferably with SMT, so a ryzen 5 1600 or above, if you're not so hot on the latest AAA releases however, then you should be fine with anything from a overclocked 2500k or stock 2200g and up, and then you can pick what games to buy on the basis of which games run well on your cpu.

[pappyman]

These numbers assume that not only is the rest of the computer not doing anything, but what it does do, will not flush cpu cache, ram cache, have hardware interrupts, or have dozens of OS threads that might lock on a spin lock waiting for a resource like graphics data from the disk for the next video frame while the OS flushes virtual memory pages to the disk. I think you need a thread (or two) available exclusively for the OS, so that the game is not core-starved intermittently.


For example, I have a browser open with 3 tabs and it uses 3 GB of ram and 8 threads. I have 10K threads active while idling on the desktop. I have nearly zero apps that start automatically except mouse drivers or essential services. I use very little cpu as a percent (3%), but I can feel a very real stall and hiccup action if I lock out all but say 2 cores, even with SMT.


I think people grossly underestimate the bloat of windows 10 and the CORE-LOAD (not the average cpu load). Hardware drivers are notorious for being poorly written and spin-lock all the time to reduce their latency. I'll never even see it if 1 or 2 or even 3 of my 12 threads spin-lock for 20 milisecs on a disk or network write, but a quad core running hard in a game would cough and stutter, and doing it in a game is the most intrusive and annoying time to do it. Also, when gaming, you're working the hardware interrupts a lot harder than looking at a browser and context switches from game to OS are time consuming, time not spent in the game.


All I'm saying is make sure you have not only enough cpu IPC, but enough spare cores so that when windows stalls a thread or two, it won't repeatedly ruin your gaming, because saving a few bucks is not a good trade-off when the only thing you want the computer to do well, is crippled by (what we know is) a bloated and inefficient platform with bad 3rd party hardware drivers messing with you.

[giovannip.]

Thanks for the analysis. Happy to know that my r5 2400g 'fill in' APU is fine for the casual gamer and with a cheap GPU 60 fps is completely achievable at 1080p. Just goes to show that the operating system and software optimisation is key to getting the most out of a PC - just look at what they could do in the 80's with 16kB on a ZX 81 or Spectrum... Old gaming PCs make great work computers 5 years down the track.

[Zarcondeegrissom]

FYI. Steve, was also looking at xeons that don't fit in more comen sockets. It wasn't a bash at 'all' used xeons, just the ones that only work on a handful of rare boards.

Great vid Chris and crew. B)

[EdwarioERS]

2:14
The 3950X will be discounted from $750 in 3 years without question, but you're probably gonna be buying it used for 2x the price of a future 8-core and it's yet to be seen if core and thread counts past 8/16 will make a difference in gaming by then. The console Zen 2 cores will be clocked lower than on desktop so I wouldn't be surprised if first gen Ryzen and Coffee Lake 6-Core CPUs last for a long time by themselves. I do believe that the multi-threaded Cinebench scores are signs that Ryzen 5s will be in a better position over the i5s lacking HT in 3 years.


Upgrading from a 2200G to a used 3950X in 3 years sounds ridiculous to me. By then 3000 series 8-Cores would still be less than 1/2 the price and would suffice for the IPC utilized from the 8/16 count. Upgrading to a 3700x or 3800x sounds more practical unless the 3950x really tanks in cost.

[AdamRychter]

In defense of your findings. I have i7-2600 non-K and I'm comfortably getting 60-75 fps in modern games. In A Plague Tale - Innocence I'm getting 116 fps average. The only problem i have are 1% low when i get dips in 40s.

[fabiusmaximuscunctator]

Actually one core in the consoles is reserved for the OS and will never be used to process a game. A second core is used for capturing gameplay footage solely, at least it used to be when the consoles were released.
For PC games in the last several years a rule of thumb was to get a CB score of at least 400 multi and 100 single. in 2019 I'd say it's more like 125 and 500.

[tech]

That's what I did to upgrade my aging 3770k, 970 and 16gb 1333mhz ddr3 ram. I bought a stopgap system on the cheap, 2600, b450, 1070, 16gb 3000mhz ddr4 ram for 650$. This is more than enough right now for 1080p 60 and I'll upgrade in 2-3 years when the price of raytracing comes down. Mostly it'll be 1 setting in the options you turn off. The rest on ultra. ;)

[Antilli]

I'd recommend 720+, simply because Windows & all the background stores like Steam also use resources, games are less well optimized compared to consoles, and settings on PC go beyond the consoles.
Another important point is that the single core performance matters quite a bit for a smooth experience, rather than just the multicore performance.

[jasongooden]

My upgrade is gonna be expensive I’m still on DDR3.

[OneDollaBill]

2600 for 145€ and 2600x for 190€ and 2700 for ~230€ are really good value for now. Considering when 9600k is just sub 300€.

Have to wait and see tho how different performance the 3600, 3600x and 3700x offer. But for just gaming anything above that is just overkill for the next 5 years or so, or at least when the games start to benefit from more cores rather than higher clocks.

[NBWDOUGHBOY]

I have a i5-4570 and GTX 970. I can run mostly every game at playable frame rates. My only issue so far has been Far Cry 5 and FCND. Those Games are CPU Hogs!

[jaydaytoday]

Battlefield 1, 5, and especially Ubisoft games hammer my Ryzen 1700x at 4.1. AC Odyssey is especially rough on my cpu as it is the bottleneck of 1070. Sometimes causing me not to hit 60fps.

[pyro]

Hardware unboxed said they are noticing the 2200G falling behind the 2400G when paired with discrete graphics cards (contra to the situation at launch).

Secondly, the high end being cheap may be a bit optimistic. The i7's on the Sandy Bridge and newer held their value relatively well compared to older CPUs. Most go for $50-70 still. At that point, I should have just paid the extra $100 on my i5 years ago (arguably inflation, but the point still stands).

[LukeHimself]

X5650 at stock clocks. I paired it with a RX 580, and I can literally play anything at 4k Max at 30-60fps (lots of things like Resident Evil 2 play Vsync locked at 60).
1440p and 1080p I haven't found a single game that won't play over the bar of 60fps stable.
Just amazing.