PC Hardware and Gaming Info

[PCDesignerRy]

I was sitting there today playing Fallout 4 because I've gone from getting 40-60 FPS in the Boston Common to now 115 at my max frames basically all the time with my hardware upgrade I've been working on. And as I was sitting there I began to wonder really how hardware affects gaming. You have a motherboard, processor, gpu, but what I'm curious to know about is how these things really affect gaming performance. Without getting into overclocking per say, how does for example a CPU affect a game performance like Fallout4? I'm using an Intel i9-9900KS. It's an 8 core 16 HT 5.0 GHz on all cores CPU, but compared to that they make AMD processors that are what, 64 cores? But what is the perfect ratio of cores to GHz for gaming exactly? There is also the GPU, RAM, and drives the game runs on to consider. My system drive is a 512 TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2, and my Steam files and Fallout 4 is on a separate 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD. My RAM is G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 32GB of DDR4-3200. So in the categories of CPU, RAM, GPU and SSDs what is the perfect balance, or the balance to shoot for to achieve the best performance in gaming? 

As always, thanks for any time and knowledge you can afford me

[Jurrunio]

The game engine has different tasks it wants the CPU to handle, say spawning of mobs, behaviour of mobs, the combat system, user input, loaded content management etc. Some task can span to different cores while some cannot, that's why more cores is better up till a certain point, but clock speed always follows "higher is better" as long as other components dont get in the way (form bottleneck). That's why this

6 minutes ago, PCDesignerRy said:

But what is the perfect ratio of cores to GHz for gaming exactly?

is not a valid question.

 

7 minutes ago, PCDesignerRy said:

There is also the GPU, RAM, and drives the game runs on

GPU: draws the frame, i.e. what the monitor shows

RAM: stores loaded portions of the game

drives: loading speed

 

8 minutes ago, PCDesignerRy said:

So in the categories of CPU, RAM, GPU and SSDs what is the perfect balance

SSD: tbh for gaming, as long as you have a decent SATA SSD it's already enough. NVMe SSDs are frankly waste of money

RAM: as long as it's fast enough to keep up with the CPU (varies from game to game and CPU to CPU) while it never runs out during the game, it's enough.

CPU: as long as it keeps up with the GPU

GPU: as long as it is able to push out frames fast enough to your standard (fps) with all the graphics details (lighting, textures, postprocessing etc), it's good enough

 

Balance is not quite the right word for this, the ratio shifts in different segments of the market (high end gaming systems bias the GPU a lot more than a low end one)

[TheBahrbarian]

15 minutes ago, PCDesignerRy said:

I was sitting there today playing Fallout 4 because I've gone from getting 40-60 FPS in the Boston Common to now 115 at my max frames basically all the time with my hardware upgrade I've been working on. And as I was sitting there I began to wonder really how hardware affects gaming. You have a motherboard, processor, gpu, but what I'm curious to know about is how these things really affect gaming performance. Without getting into overclocking per say, how does for example a CPU affect a game performance like Fallout4? I'm using an Intel i9-9900KS. It's an 8 core 16 HT 5.0 GHz on all cores CPU, but compared to that they make AMD processors that are what, 64 cores? But what is the perfect ratio of cores to GHz for gaming exactly? There is also the GPU, RAM, and drives the game runs on to consider. My system drive is a 512 TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2, and my Steam files and Fallout 4 is on a separate 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD. My RAM is G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 32GB of DDR4-3200. So in the categories of CPU, RAM, GPU and SSDs what is the perfect balance, or the balance to shoot for to achieve the best performance in gaming? 

As always, thanks for any time and knowledge you can afford me

For games in general GPU is king. The more powerful the better, that is what is going to net you higher fps. It's pretty self explanatory. A GPU's memory (or vram) is basically used for storing textures or whatever is currently rendered and on screen. So basically as long as you have enough memory, you're good to go.

 

In general CPU is much less important, however, with a sufficiently powerful GPU, a weak CPU can bottleneck or slow down your system. Basically your GPU is processing frames faster than your CPU can handle. This means despite getting high fps you will get long frametimes which usually means you get stuttering or inconsistent FPS. But in general you can get away with a mid-range cpu paired with a high end GPU. Also, there are certain aspects of games that are handles on the CPU, and therefore these specific settings in games can affect performance if you have a weak CPU. Things like physics are generally processed on a CPU.

 

As for what kind of CPU is best, it used to be believed that a 4 core CPU was best and that more cores didn't help. Modern games however are getting much better at using more threads on a cpu meaning the sweet spot is closer to 6 or 8 core cpus. In general higher clock speed is always better, but that's not the whole story. This is clear in AMD's current lineup, where some of their high end CPUs have lower clocks compared to intel's yet still outperform them (or nearly match them(. This is thanks to AMD's 7nm process which has given them a significant IPC (instructions per clock) advantage (this is a pretty vague answer but it sums up the general idea). This is why at the end of the day there is no single metric you can compare CPUs by, and the best way is simply to do your research and see how each cpu performs in the real world.

 

For storage, the only thing that will really effect is the startup/loading times of your game. It would never really effect the performance to my knowledge, unless you have some seriously slow storage. 

 

RAM is less important than either CPU or GPU, but still important nonetheless. The most important thing is that you have enough capacity. If your ram is full while playing a game, it will cause some serious performance falloff as I believe generally a computer will then try to compensate by using your drive storage for memory (which doesn't work well since it's comparatively so slow). Memory speeds and latency does affect gaming performance as well. Certain systems (such as Ryzen based systems) do prefer to have faster memory. Generally faster memory just means your PC can load and read data onto the memory faster. I can't speak to the specifics as to why certain systems are more sensitive to speed than others, but that's the general idea.

[Snowarch]

well, Id say, its likely dependent on use.

 

- slower but many cores is more heavy tasts at once with less lag, such as gaming and streaming at once.

- faster cores but less would be dedicated heavy task and low-mid tasts in background. 

-gpu does the biggest work for gaming, but if your cpu is too weak to handle it it doesn't help much. hence the reason a 1.1ghz X4 core wouldn't be effected much by a external gpu. 

Ram - higher settings allow for extended features like enhanced view.

- SSD/HDD less os lag, so asside from boot time less diffrence. if playing low resolution, at a point ssd majes more diffrence than ram.

[PCDesignerRy]

Thanks for the info guys I really appreciate getting a better understanding of this when considering future system upgrades. 

[LateLesley]

It's not a question that can be answered for gaming in general - games use many different and constantly updating game engines, which have different requirements. And along with that come different hardware requirements too.

 

From what I can find Fallout 4 uses the Creation game engine. But other games use different ones, like Unity, Source, or RAGE. So while you could optimise your hardware for one engine, it may not be optimal for another. 

 

Also different game engines are optimised differently, some need a fast single core, some spread over multiple cores, some use GPU acceleration, while others rely on the CPU. 

 

So you can't optimise your machine for all games - and that's why people will ask which games you are talking about, to figure out if it's single core bound, multi core, favours CPU or GPU, before making upgrade recommendations. 

 

Also what monitor you have factors in too - Resolution - it's far harder for a GPU to render scenes for a 4K monitor than it is for say 1080p. There's just far more pixels, which means more GPU memory required, and more time to read and throw those pixels at the screen. 

 

The upshot is, in order to cover most games, you just need raw horsepower, which could overcome and shortcomings of different engines, which is why most people go for high end GPUs and CPUs, so there are enough raw speed (IPC and clockspeed) so not to make the difference.

 

An often overlooked part can be the motherboard too - how the busses are set up and bus speeds can make a difference too, for example PCI-E 3.0 vs PCI-E 2.0 run at different speeds, and the PCI-E 3.0 will be faster and more efficient. It gets really technical though diving that deep, looking at bus contention and things like that, and it's less of an issue nowadays where many components have busses with direct connection to the CPU. But these things can factor in if you are trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a machine. 

 

You seem to have a reasonably well spec'd PC, though you don't mention your GPU. 

 

The upshop is you need really to go for hardware spec'd above what the recommended specs are for whatever game you are looking to play. And every game has different specs. Could you imagine trying to play Fallout 4 on a machine spec'd for Descent 2??   https://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=2114&game=Descent 2

 

So, there is no easy answer - you can only ever go for what is decent hardware for the generation you are in. Chances are in 3-4 years, it'll be too old. 

[PCDesignerRy]

26 minutes ago, LateLesley said:

It's not a question that can be answered for gaming in general - games use many different and constantly updating game engines, which have different requirements. And along with that come different hardware requirements too.

 

From what I can find Fallout 4 uses the Creation game engine. But other games use different ones, like Unity, Source, or RAGE. So while you could optimise your hardware for one engine, it may not be optimal for another. 

 

Also different game engines are optimised differently, some need a fast single core, some spread over multiple cores, some use GPU acceleration, while others rely on the CPU. 

 

So you can't optimise your machine for all games - and that's why people will ask which games you are talking about, to figure out if it's single core bound, multi core, favours CPU or GPU, before making upgrade recommendations. 

 

Also what monitor you have factors in too - Resolution - it's far harder for a GPU to render scenes for a 4K monitor than it is for say 1080p. There's just far more pixels, which means more GPU memory required, and more time to read and throw those pixels at the screen. 

 

The upshot is, in order to cover most games, you just need raw horsepower, which could overcome and shortcomings of different engines, which is why most people go for high end GPUs and CPUs, so there are enough raw speed (IPC and clockspeed) so not to make the difference.

 

An often overlooked part can be the motherboard too - how the busses are set up and bus speeds can make a difference too, for example PCI-E 3.0 vs PCI-E 2.0 run at different speeds, and the PCI-E 3.0 will be faster and more efficient. It gets really technical though diving that deep, looking at bus contention and things like that, and it's less of an issue nowadays where many components have busses with direct connection to the CPU. But these things can factor in if you are trying to squeeze every last drop of performance out of a machine. 

 

You seem to have a reasonably well spec'd PC, though you don't mention your GPU. 

 

The upshop is you need really to go for hardware spec'd above what the recommended specs are for whatever game you are looking to play. And every game has different specs. Could you imagine trying to play Fallout 4 on a machine spec'd for Descent 2??   https://www.game-debate.com/games/index.php?g_id=2114&game=Descent 2

 

So, there is no easy answer - you can only ever go for what is decent hardware for the generation you are in. Chances are in 3-4 years, it'll be too old. 

It's an Asus Strix 1080Ti  

[LateLesley]

Och, at that spec, if your at 1440p or under, you're good for a fair wee while. You'd even get away with 4K for a lot of things. Be at least a couple of years before you should be looking at upgrades. well, save for more storage space if you need it. But even spinning rust would do for that, and you can keep the most used stuff on your SSDs. Your spec should tackle most things, unless you want new tech like RTX, then you're looking at a GPU upgrade. 

 

You'd cry if you tried my machine. I'm on an Athlon II generation machine with a GTX 750 Ti and recently upgraded 16GB RAM, up from 8GB. All so I could play Cities Skylines. I cannae play the shooters, all the young whipper-snappers just have me watching myself being shot and respawning.  

[PCDesignerRy]

4 hours ago, LateLesley said:

Och, at that spec, if your at 1440p or under, you're good for a fair wee while. You'd even get away with 4K for a lot of things. Be at least a couple of years before you should be looking at upgrades. well, save for more storage space if you need it. But even spinning rust would do for that, and you can keep the most used stuff on your SSDs. Your spec should tackle most things, unless you want new tech like RTX, then you're looking at a GPU upgrade. 

 

You'd cry if you tried my machine. I'm on an Athlon II generation machine with a GTX 750 Ti and recently upgraded 16GB RAM, up from 8GB. All so I could play Cities Skylines. I cannae play the shooters, all the young whipper-snappers just have me watching myself being shot and respawning.  

Well I'm also a bit on the more dedicated side of building which can't possibly be expected of everyone. I have no girlfriend wife or kids, my life orbits around my tech and I've gone so far as both moving states and becoming debt free for the sake of my build. There are different levels of importance though. Still, if I weren't at the level I'm at now on my builds I'd have to question myself pretty heavily. 

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, PCDesignerRy said:

I was sitting there today playing Fallout 4 because I've gone from getting 40-60 FPS in the Boston Common to now 115 at my max frames basically all the time with my hardware upgrade I've been working on. And as I was sitting there I began to wonder really how hardware affects gaming. You have a motherboard, processor, gpu, but what I'm curious to know about is how these things really affect gaming performance.

 

Most games are still only designed to use one CPU core, with some platforms having at least an audio thread that is part of the native audio api. This is why one is supposed to pick the highest single-threaded CPU over the one with more cores in most circumstances. 

 

12 hours ago, PCDesignerRy said:

Without getting into overclocking per say, how does for example a CPU affect a game performance like Fallout4? I'm using an Intel i9-9900KS. It's an 8 core 16 HT 5.0 GHz on all cores CPU, but compared to that they make AMD processors that are what, 64 cores? But what is the perfect ratio of cores to GHz for gaming exactly?

The CPU is used for everything, so it's the one part that makes the most difference. It's not like a game goes "hey I only need 1Ghz of performance", that's not how it works. A game always uses the maximum available performance, and unless the game has been designed without doing a busy-wait (eg event driven, only renders on retrace, only changes state on input, etc) loop, it also will burn idle CPU power doing nothing. This is why typically older games "got faster" when the CPU was significantly upgraded. Newer games that are designed using event callbacks, don't do busy-wait, so they will give up CPU control when they don't need it which is more typical of a non-gaming application, however this comes with several penalties, one being "losing focus/context" of the video and/or audio, so it has to reload textures into memory if you alt-tab in a PC game for example. Mobile games have to also deal with being swapped into the background and unloaded on demand, so you also have a state where the game has to effectively reload from scratch but preserve state when swapped out.

 

In most cases, extra cores in a game go unused except where the game has a massively parallizable element to it, like AI controlling multiple monsters, or Physics. Bethesda is known for both threading bugs and GPU refresh rate bugs in the Elder Scrolls (eg Skyrim) and Fallout titles. More CPU or GPU power shouldn't produce bugs, but Bethesda's solution is to basically nerf the game so it doesn't use extra resources because the bugs make the game unplayable. It's not the only game engine with severe issues, but it is the most notable. Many other games have physics bugs tied to GPU framerate, and that ranges from jiggle physics (eg boobs and debris bouncing) to broken gameplay (goat simulator, GTA IV and V) clipping/launching objects into things in amusing ways.

 

12 hours ago, PCDesignerRy said:

There is also the GPU, RAM, and drives the game runs on to consider. My system drive is a 512 TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2, and my Steam files and Fallout 4 is on a separate 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD. My RAM is G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 32GB of DDR4-3200. So in the categories of CPU, RAM, GPU and SSDs what is the perfect balance, or the balance to shoot for to achieve the best performance in gaming? 

As always, thanks for any time and knowledge you can afford me

Max out the GPU first in most cases, then RAM, then CPU. While the CPU may make the most significant difference in game responsiveness, the GPU controls the frame rate and visual quality, and a game with poor visual quality is not worth recording/streaming. 

 

Now streaming, which applies also to services like Stadia and nVidia's Geforce Now as well as other upcoming services in the pipeline, will always produce bad visuals subject to network congestion, but a game with poor visual quality to begin with, will be compressed into garbage. RGB to YUV2 colorspace conversion with significant compression of color and pixel detail, effectively any Video you watch that is compressed with most mpeg video codecs results in 75% of the color information being thrown away, so that 1080p HD game? only has 960x540 pixels of color information. This is why when you upload anything to youtube, you need to upload it at twice the pixel resolution you intend for it to be streamed at, because youtube makes a lot of very stupid assumptions, and uploading anything at less than 1080p usually results in it being downscaled to 720p, even if it it was just shy of 1080p. That results in some absolutely unreadable video from games that would otherwise have crisp text.

 

My suggestion in most cases is that if you have no intention of streaming a game, and are instead looking for the most responsive gameplay, you would then want to consider a CPU with the highest single-threaded performance under regular air-cooling options. Most benchmarks are not reflective of real-world game performance, and only work as a measuring stick for minimum framerate under the most complex thing the benchmark can throw at it. There will no doubt be places in some games that result in edge cases that even the most overkill PC will not maintain the minimum frame rate obtained in the benchmark.

 

If you are streaming, and not using the hardware encoder (eg NVENC/QSV/etc) then more CPU cores affords you more software-compression options. Now this is where things tend to get sticky, because the entire video composition process when using software like OBS, has to be done in software, even if you use a hardware encoding step, so you generally do end up with worse video on systems with less RAM and less CPU cores. So this would be done as a trade-off between CPU cores and CPU speed. Just adding something like an animated gif to the video, costs as much performance as adding a webcam video, because both require compositing the game video with a layer, thus adding latency to the video output, which can also desync the audio, which is why the encoder will drop frames to keep up. More cores, less dropped frames.

 

However in most cases, gaming PC's are still far overkill than game consoles with the exact same game. Game consoles have fixed hardware, so games can be tuned for that CPU and GPU configuration. This results in "the PC port" (which was undoubtedly the hardware developed on) almost always being capped at the performance of the weakest console port (which tends to be the Switch version) since PC hardware is highly variable, and someone with an i3 and 2 cores and 8GB of ram still must be able to play the game at low resolution, even if you have an i9 and 8 cores and can play at high resolution.

 

 

 

[Xiee]

Do you have mods running on Fallout 4? You'll get huge FPS drops if you run any texture mods that change textures to 2K or 4K.  If you have any mods installed, you might also want to consider the load order of these mods as it can affect performance as well.

[PCDesignerRy]

4 hours ago, Xiee said:

Do you have mods running on Fallout 4? You'll get huge FPS drops if you run any texture mods that change textures to 2K or 4K.  If you have any mods installed, you might also want to consider the load order of these mods as it can affect performance as well.

I did have mods running, I run a ton of mods for Fallout 4, but I went under the performance category and they have some pretty good stuff in there. Using several of those mods, I'm able to basically get my game to run everywhere at 115 FPS smoothly. The mods, basically remove shadows and grass from the game, but everything else is running at ultra, and it changes some of the meshes, but it has made a drastic difference. I do run LOOT