Cores or Frequency?

[Keagan554]

What do you think will perform 'better' in games, a Dual core running at 4GHz or a Quad core running at 2GHz?

 

just a little thought I had, I think the dual core will have a higher frame rate, just by a smidge.

[tom_w141]

4 minutes ago, Keagan554 said:

What do you think will perform 'better' in games, a Dual core running at 4GHz or a Quad core running at 2GHz?

 

just a little thought I had, I think the dual core will have a higher frame rate, just by a smidge.

Depends entirely on the application and IPC. There is more to it than number of cores and frequency.

[rn8686]

Depends on the types of games and resolution being played at (A G4560 will perform similar to 7700k at 4K for instance), but overall 4 cores would be better. Is it just straight 2 cores or hyper threading like an i3/G4560? 

[tom_w141]

13 minutes ago, rn8686 said:

resurrection being played at

Personally I resurrect at 3440x1440 100fps

[rn8686]

1 minute ago, tom_w141 said:

Personally I resurrect at 3440x1440 100fps

My mistake, just a typo 

[tom_w141]

Just now, rn8686 said:

My mistake, just a typo 

I know man just being (un)funny

[typographie]

It's hard to generalize this in a meaningful way without more specifics, but I will point out that halving the frequency would be a gigantic hit in most games. 2 GHz Xeons are usually regarded as poorer gaming CPUs than ~4+ GHz i5's of a comparable architecture, though I suspect the forum consensus may have shifted on that in this post-Ryzen world.

 

It really matters what dual-core, what quad-core, and in what games though.

[JoostinOnline]

It depends on what you're doing, but games are usually designed with four physical cores in mind, and CPU intensive ones usually won't run well on a dual core no matter the frequency.  That's one reason Ryzen 7 doesn't perform super well in gaming.  It has 8 physical cores (and 16 threads).  Four has been the magic number for a long time.

 

On the other hand, if you try to run a game that's 10+ years old on a quad/dual core CPU at a lower frequency, it won't run well at all.  Back then, games weren't multithreaded.  At least one of your cores has to be really fast if it's an intensive game.