How much does CPU speed affect gaming performance?

[orangecat]

I'm currently benchmarking and overclocking my system as I go and from 3.5Ghz I got around 106FPS in valley benchmark and at 3.9Ghz I was getting 122.8FPS... I find it hard to believe that a small difference in clock speed can make that big of a difference. Also min fps jumped about 10 fps.

[FloRolf]

if your CPU is a really crappy one that is bottlenecking your GPU like crazy then yes it can happen but usually not that much

[Samfisher]

I'm currently benchmarking and overclocking my system as I go and from 3.5Ghz I got around 106FPS in valley benchmark and at 3.9Ghz I was getting 122.8FPS... I find it hard to believe that a small difference in clock speed can make that big of a difference. Also min fps jumped about 10 fps.

 

Going from 3.5GHz to 3.9GHz is more than a 10% increase in clockspeed, why wouldn't you expect a decent difference?

[incarnate]

The only way a cpu overclock will increase fps is if you had a bottleneck. Can you verify if you had 100% gpu usage before the overclock?

[Redsun20]

I'm currently benchmarking and overclocking my system as I go and from 3.5Ghz I got around 106FPS in valley benchmark and at 3.9Ghz I was getting 122.8FPS... I find it hard to believe that a small difference in clock speed can make that big of a difference. Also min fps jumped about 10 fps.

Depends Really. It makes a much larger difference on AMD CPU's as their single threaded performance (what you need fore most games) is much worse than Intel

[WoodenMarker]

It depends on the game. Most games plateau with more cpu power once there's enough available. Benchmarks tend to scale well and not have this issue.

[orangecat]

The only way a cpu overclock will increase fps is if you had a bottleneck. Can you verify if you had 100% gpu usage before the overclock?

I have a GTX 970 and a 3570k I doubt the CPU is bottlenecking the graphics card. But yea I did have 100% usage on the GPU.

[orangecat]

It depends on the game. Most games plateau with more cpu power once there's enough available. Benchmarks tend to scale well and not have this issue.

That seems about right. Thanks for the input.

[Tim Drake]

Yes with bottlenecks between CPU and GPU

 

Also the more CPU intensive, the more it seems to help.

 

Also games that don't use all your cores like Arma will benefit from faster speeds on the only cores it can access

[brokencross]

The only way a cpu overclock will increase fps is if you had a bottleneck. Can you verify if you had 100% gpu usage before the overclock?

Not really. Even if your cpu isn't bottlenecking, an higher clock will help with framerates on cpu intensive games.