Understanding CPUs

[SimonBourque]

Hey,

I was wondering what made a game or a

software cpu intensive. I have seen claims that the new games

will utilise que cpu more but i hardly beleive it

Pls help me out

Thank you

[jscho]

Hey,

I was wondering what made a game or a

software cpu intensive. I have seen claims that the new games

will utilise que cpu more but i hardly beleive it

Pls help me out

Thank you

Well a game will always use more GPU than CPU. But the next-gen consoles, which use 8 core CPUs I think, will lead to game developers to making their games work much better on multi-core or multi-threaded CPUs. This means better CPU utilisation. Though a game will never use more CPU than, say a hardcore video editing program for example.

Games will use CPUs better in coming months with the release of next-gen consoles. Which is good for us PC gamers

[Kuzma]

Read some of the threads in my signature

[stevv]

Hey,

I was wondering what made a game or a

software cpu intensive. I have seen claims that the new games

will utilise que cpu more but i hardly beleive it

Pls help me out

Thank you

 

 

In a nutshell, any calculations that need to be done, that doesn't have a specialized hardware to handle it (graphics rendering, sound encoding/decoding...), the programmers will have to hand it off to the CPU to process.  

 

For example games, the "AI" of your enemies, or physics of objects hitting each other.  Newer/updated game engines will try to use more of the cores available in the CPU since multi-core CPU are becoming much more popular.

 

Simple case: Nvidia Physx can run on nvidia cards or the CPU, but when it runs through CPU, it only uses one thread, even if you have multiple cores/threads available.  This is mainly due to developers not always optimizing game to work with multiple threads available in modern cpu's.  The "why" is a whole other can of worms to stay away from now.  

 

Also, with the next gen consoles being multi-CPU cored, the developers have more incentive to use their time and $ to optimize for the extra cores.  That effort will (hopefully, but expecting) pass on to the PC side too.