> Intel is still king in high-end gaming performance
Not really if you consider the price per core. Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit. Comparable Intel CPUs are a lot more expensive. Their only advantage is higher overclock frequency. But if you need to overclock your CPU to play something, that game is already poorly designed and is probably not using all cores properly.
> Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit.
No they don’t. Most games barely scale to use 4 cores - some struggle to use even 2.
Even games with tons of threads tend to have a one thread that is ultra heavy which become the limiting factor - i.e. you need single thread performance.
It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too.
It means they are poorly designed which is exactly my point. It's not really a measure of CPU quality, but rather the measure of those games quality. Normal games today use something like Vulkan to saturate the GPU and should not be CPU bound.
So if you need a single thread performance that requires overclocking, it's a poor engine design.
> It’s moot regardless since Intel’s i9-9900K has 8 cores and 16 threads too
And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Unfortunately, time is at a premium in game development - the amount of crunch is already absurded.
Multithreading hasn’t gotten any easier.
Even when games are forced to multithread like on consoles. Said games run on PCs with half the cores (admittedly at nearly twice the clock speed and higher IPC) outpace consoles with 2x the frame rates.
> And costs a lot a lot more. That's why I mentioned price per core above. I'd use such price difference to get a better GPU instead.
Of course, it’s the best on the market. Intel would be stupid not to charge a premium. It’s how such things are priced.
My point is, for gaming there is no need to spend so much money just to get higher single core frequency. There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue. Most games don't require overclocking really.
That’s correct. I never buy the top of the line because I know it doesn’t have a good cost:benefit ratio.
BUT there are people that want the absolute best available and have the money to afford it ... /shrug
> There are some games that are very poorly optimized, but I see them as edge cases which you can skip if it becomes an issue.
There are a lot of games that aren’t well threaded.
Well multithreaded games are primarily by rich AAA developers - and not even all of them do it; some just don’t have the programming talent for it and some have games that have ran for decades that are too old to multithread without rewriting the whole game.
PS: Sorry for late reply. Apparently people disagreed with me and I had negative Karma for a while. Which slows down posting?
Most game source code I've seen has exhibited this "poorly designed" trait. Some because it was originally written in a single-threaded context and continued to provide shareholder value, and others because it didn't have high enough performance needs to utilize parallelism.
I think that will slowly change over time though, especially for big-budget titles that want to scale with performance better. Architectures like Unity's Job System and the specs package in Rust[1] with a stronger emphasis on staged data processing can help with utilizing cores and cache.
Not really if you consider the price per core. Normally designed games utilize all cores, and something like Ryzen 7 2700X provides a major benefit. Comparable Intel CPUs are a lot more expensive. Their only advantage is higher overclock frequency. But if you need to overclock your CPU to play something, that game is already poorly designed and is probably not using all cores properly.