6 cores is all you need for gaming

[Choli90]

So I've been seeing the "argument" between you need only 6 cores for gaming and someone should invest in more than 6 cores for more smoothness, premium experience and having a CPU that won't have to be upgrade as soon.

 

So I was curious, if anybody has upgraded past 6 cores and what your thoughts were.

 

Going back to getting more than 6 cores because of smoothness, using apples to oranges, people only need the base model automobile, but buy a higher model trim for the better experience 

[xg32]

6 cores can game, but 6 core isn't "all you need", benchmarks easily show there is performance to be gained

 

Let say i have to pick between a 5600 and a 5800x3d for a 3000usd build, and the 5800x3d gets me 10% more fps on the lows, then i'd probably go with the 5800x3d, but neither choice is definitive.

 

Or here's another thought, if someone was doing a build with a 3090ti, would they be using a 6 core cpu? unlikely, the 12700k was just 300usd awhile back.

 

As for personal experience, going from a 8700k to a 5950x exposed frametime issues even with a 1080ti.

[porina]

Looking at core count for gaming by itself is overly simplistic, but as a generalisation if you're not overly budget constrained I'd aim for a gaming build today to have 8 cores as something that'll be comfortable for the years ahead. 6 cores should still be fine but be a more entry level experience. This is on the assumption of buying recent generation CPUs too, at the least Coffee Lake, Zen 2 or newer. Older CPUs even if 6+ cores would not be the best gaming option, even if they can still offer a more than usable experience.

 

Personally I'm running a 5800H in my gaming laptop, and a 11700k in my TV gaming system. I also have a 7920X (12 core) in my streaming setup but it is worse at gaming if you're seeking peak performance.

 

Edit: I had 6 cores before that (8086k, 10600k) and to be honest I don't notice a difference in the games I play, but they're more GPU limited regardless. Moving to 8 cores is on the basis the current gen decent consoles have 8 cores too, so that is an obvious optimisation point for game devs for recent and foreseeable future titles. I'd consider 8 fast cores to be optimal for pure gaming. Putting aside the recent 5800X3D, on AMD side I'd rather have the 5800X over the 12/16 core versions.

[BlackDragon1971]

Doom Eternal runs butter smooth on my system with Ray Tracing enabled...

6 Core / 12 Thread CPU, 64 GB Quad Cannel DDR4 2666 MHz Ram, NVMe SSD, RTX 2070... 

Well enough for me anyway. Doom Eternal may not be the most demanding game, but is has all the eye candy I want and is recent enough.

[EXTRADODO]

It all come down to what your usage gonna be.

If you're like me who play game without streaming or running a bunch of chrome tabs and apps in background,
I'm sure 6C is enough for it. You won't be getting the best of the best performance but it's already on good spot for gaming.

If you have to open a bunch of software beside game+discord, better cores might looks better.

 

It depends on how you gonna be using.
Cheers!

[BlackDragon1971]

I use my system as a daily driver that can do 2D graphic / artwork in Autodesk and Corel apps, play music and can do some gaming to relax.... even then it has more than enough umph to do the tasks I need.

[wildgg]

46 minutes ago, Mayorville said:

So I've been seeing the "argument" between you need only 6 cores for gaming and someone should invest in more than 6 cores for more smoothness, premium experience and having a CPU that won't have to be upgrade as soon.

 

So I was curious, if anybody has upgraded past 6 cores and what your thoughts were.

 

Going back to getting more than 6 cores because of smoothness, using apples to oranges, people only need the base model automobile, but buy a higher model trim for the better experience 

I recently upgraded to a 12700kf from a 8700k and even though there's huge IPC differences between the two i had the 8700k max out on a very few games but it was still smooth gameplay.

The games i play that did max out the 8700k, it used 7/8cores on the 12700kf but not at full load, not even close actually.
I thought i wouldn't appreciate the E-Cores on the 12gen but since i've started using Process lasso and splitting up tasks between the P and E cores i've had a super smooth experience.

Yes 6cores is enough for gaming but it's really nice to have a few extra cores especially if you run stuff along side games.

[Eigenvektor]

2 hours ago, Mayorville said:

So I was curious, if anybody has upgraded past 6 cores and what your thoughts were.

I have a 5900x, but mainly because I need it for productivity. Those additional cores are not worth it for gaming (yet). GPU is the limiting factor in pretty much everything.

 

How much you benefit from additional cores depends a lot on the game. Older games either only use a single thread, or have one thread that performs most of the heavy lifting. In that case a single fast core is worth more than many cores.

 

In the past you often only had the choice between few fast cores and many slow cores. Combined with games that could make very little use of those cores, it was better to go with the faster CPU if all you did was game. Nowadays you can get CPUs with many cores that are still fast, so it's less of an either/or choice. Though there are some older games that will behave weird with too many cores (but you can always disable them temporarily).

 

Modern games are starting to make use of additional cores and are better at scaling across these cores, so it's more worthwhile to have more cores. How many you need still depends on the game. If a game doesn't tax the CPU overly much, you might still be fine with a quad core. However if it needs to perform some additional computation quickly (e.g. some new enemy spawning in), you might get less latency if there's an unused core that can do it, rather than adding it to the workload of a core that is already at 80% load.

 

I think 6 cores is or used to be the sweet spot (cost/performance), but I'd expect that number to go up with modern engines becoming better at making use of these resources, especially since additional performance with higher clocks is harder to come by then it used to be. So engines will have to become better at parallelizing things if they need more performance.

[Mister Woof]

Personal experience going from a 5ghz 8700k to a 5.1-5.3ghz (5.1 mostly) 10900k with a 3080, there are times where it's not noticable and there's times where it's much smoother in gameplay. Although some of that might be mostly due to cache increase (12mb on the 8700k to 20mb on the 10900k)

 

There's also times where you really appreciate the cores. An example is when games do shader optimization, the 8700k had me waiting quite a bit longer to complete the task.

 

Same goes for general software installation and anything compute heavy, like unpacking steam installs.

 

 

 

[jones177]

I do not like gaming on a 6 core any more.

 

Even though I built an 8 core i9 9900k rig in 2019 it went straight video editing so my first high core count gaming CPU was the i9 10900k and it is still my favorite.

 

I ended up giving my i9 10900k rig to my Son for a video editing upgrade and went back to my old i7 8086k for gaming. That lasted less than a week. I did not like it so I ordered the parts to build another i9 10900k rig.

 

I don't mind 8 core CPUs. 

My R9 5900x rig had a 5800x in it at first.  When the prices dropped on the 5900x I bought one. They feel the same so I won't miss it when I get a 5800x3D.

 

[freeagent]

A lot of you guys make it sound like playing a game is like running prime95 or something. Games are not stressful lol. 6 cores are fine.

 

My 5600X games just fine. I actually like it better because its easy to cool, and my fans stay quiet.

[BahnStormer]

It depends on the game....

 

I haven't seen them, but apparently some games will leverage 5 or 6 cores... at which point ANY background processes will cause dropped frames.

 

Most games that I've played - even some very recent titles, don't use more than 2 or 3 cores, so 6 cores is plenty MOST of the time.

 

There are some other advantages to the higher spec CPU's, but comparing a 5600X to a 5900X is not fair as there is a very obvious clockspeed difference (4.6Ghz boost vs 4.7Ghz boost) and for those that say they overclock their CPU to the same speed as the higher spec model - you're missing the almost equally obvious 32Mb cache vs 64Mb cache.

 

As per the 5800X3D: more cache (96Mb) can often benefit real-world applications more than clock speed or cores. Even with a 200/300Mhz defecit (4.5Ghz), this CPU beats the faster and more core-heavy 5900X/5950X in a lot of benchmarks and games - other than those that are purely multi-core tests.

 

6 cores will remain the discerning, budget-conscious gamers choice for the next couple of years.

 

8 cores is making a strong case for itself though - with increasingly competitive pricing and the promise of a little more headroom for future titles an added bonus, but don't buy a CPU today for games in 3 or 5 years' time - you're just throwing your money away. 

 

edit: as per freeagent's comments, don't discount the hassle of cooling a higher TDP CPU - ventilation, room cooling, case fan noise, etc. I dread to thing what RTX4000 series + Intel CPU's are going to need in terms of PSU... I just hope RDNA3 has decent ray tracing as AMD's emphasis of performance PER WATT is going to be increasingly appealing...

[freeagent]

11 minutes ago, BahnStormer said:

There are some other advantages to the higher spec CPU's, but comparing a 5600X to a 5900X is not fair as there is a very obvious clockspeed difference (4.6Ghz boost vs 4.7Ghz boost) and for those that say they overclock their CPU to the same speed as the higher spec model - you're missing the almost equally obvious 32Mb cache vs 64Mb cache.

I let my 5600X boost to 4850 and I let my 5900X boost to 5150 with PBO and CO. Make no mistake the 5900X is superior in every way, but the 5600X is easy to cool and it plays games just fine. Before I bought a second board I flip flopped back and forth more than a few times, and almost sold my 5900X a few times

[xAcid9]

6c/6t or 6c/12t? The latter will be fine for a couple more years but the former is not cutting it anymore imo. 

[Choli90]

8 hours ago, BlackDragon1971 said:

Doom Eternal runs butter smooth on my system with Ray Tracing enabled...

6 Core / 12 Thread CPU, 64 GB Quad Cannel DDR4 2666 MHz Ram, NVMe SSD, RTX 2070... 

Well enough for me anyway. Doom Eternal may not be the most demanding game, but is has all the eye candy I want and is recent enough.

The main argument I've been seeing is based on your response ("well enough for me"). I have to assume you haven't seen or played the same game(s) on a higher core count processor?

 

If not, and you had the chance to, and noticed a difference (not in FPS), but in smoothness, frametime graph, etc, would you stick with 6 cores

 

 

[xg32]

34 minutes ago, Mayorville said:

.

 

 

sticking with a 6core than building a 6core is 2 completely different things

 

would i stick with 6 core? sure. would i build with a 6core now that gpu prices have dropped, no way. 12700k was 300usd and 5900x was 360usd, i can understand why ppl don't wanna pay 450 for the x3d tho.

 

cyberpunk and warhammer was legit awful on 6 cores, but those are outliers (for now)

[BahnStormer]

Pretty sure that Ryzens have all been 2:1 thread:core ratio... even Intel stopped doing that market-segmentation nonsense a few years ago... I've got a an i5-3570K in my #3 HTPC and I think that was one of the last to do that...

5 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

6c/6t or 6c/12t? The latter will be fine for a couple more years but the former is not cutting it anymore imo. 

 

[BlackDragon1971]

On 5/1/2022 at 1:07 PM, Mayorville said:

The main argument I've been seeing is based on your response ("well enough for me"). I have to assume you haven't seen or played the same game(s) on a higher core count processor?

 

If not, and you had the chance to, and noticed a difference (not in FPS), but in smoothness, frametime graph, etc, would you stick with 6 cores

 

 

My next upgrade will likely be an Intel Cascade Lake Core i9 10920x / Asus x299 Deluxe II motherboard based system. For now what I have does me quite well.

Primarily this computer is an at home 2D Art Production machine that can entertain me when not producing art... or while producing art. If it can run some cool games reasonably well... all the better. It does its job and has bells and whistles.

BlackDragon

[HM-2]

29 minutes ago, BlackDragon1971 said:

My next upgrade will likely be an Intel Cascade Lake Core i9 10920x / Asus x299 Deluxe II motherboard based system.

I wouldn't. I looked at going this way, and even with the MASSIVE price cuts the legacy platform has been getting in recent months AM4 + 59*0X works out MUCH better value for money. 

[HardStroke]

yep

Just replaced my 10600K with a 10900K

Already had everything ready, Motherboard and cooler

Did that on purpose when I bought my pc

Went with a top tier GPU, a high-end Motherboard and a good cpu cooler so I could upgrade to the best LGA1200 cpu and also overclock it to squeeze every single frame out of it

"future proofed" my pc as best as I could without breaking the bank

This 10900K would last at least 3 or 4 gpu changes, as well as my Antec HCG 850W psu - my last pc was an I5 3550 that I OCed to 4.1GHz and a GTX 650

I don't upgrade every 4 or 5 years

And it was not bad getting the 10900K for 490 Bucks (yeah, its normal in my country) instead of 775 when it came out

Actually payed 250 since I sold my 10600K and I wanted to get it before intel takes it off the shelfs

10700K, 11700K, 11900K - same cpu

Didn't want to go from a 6/12 cpu to a 8/16 so I just got the best cpu for LGA1200 which is a 10/20 cpu

I game at FHD 240HZ so every frames counts (mostly fps but I also play triple A games from time to time)

I also edit and I am doing things that the 10600K did show its lack of cores

[BlackDragon1971]

2 hours ago, HM-2 said:

I wouldn't. I looked at going this way, and even with the MASSIVE price cuts the legacy platform has been getting in recent months AM4 + 59*0X works out MUCH better value for money. 

But that is AMD... Nope.

[YoungBlade]

Going from the 6c/6t i5 9600K to the 12c/24t R9 5900X, I can tell you that, when gaming at 1440p with an RTX 2060 Super, there is effectively no difference. It doesn't feel any different and the game benchmarks I run are within a few percent of each other. Maybe there is additional smoothness, but the fact that I question whether or not there is should tell you that it's not a meaningful difference.

 

So if you have a mid-range card, like an RTX 3060 or RX 6600, and you play single player games at higher settings, getting more than an i5 12400 or R5 5600 for gaming is a waste of money until you upgrade the card.

[freeagent]

9 minutes ago, BlackDragon1971 said:

But that is AMD... Nope.

I keep my Intel rigs nice and safe in their boxes on the shelf.

[Mister Woof]

25 minutes ago, BlackDragon1971 said:

But that is AMD... Nope.

A 12700f would probably give the i9-10920x a run for it's money.  Hell even a 12600k might.

 

They'll definitely game better.

[xAcid9]

On 5/2/2022 at 3:44 AM, BahnStormer said:

Pretty sure that Ryzens have all been 2:1 thread:core ratio... even Intel stopped doing that market-segmentation nonsense a few years ago... I've got a an i5-3570K in my #3 HTPC and I think that was one of the last to do that...

8th and 9th gen i5 exist, that's why I asked.