How valid are the claims that games will use more cores soon?

[Guest]

Since Ryzen released I have seen this uttered over and over again, before this it was silent, few people said anything about more cores/threads, people with quad cores were still 'okay'.

 

Now suddenly everyone is repeating the mantra of 'you need more cores & threads, games will use them more etc.'

 

I don't really know where this came from, people have been repeating it so much since Ryzen's launch, but is it based in reality?

What is your take on it?

[PlayStation 2]

This bullshit has been repeated since Bulldozer was a thing. Has it been grounded into reality? Kinda, and you can thank current generation consoles for helping with that. But as for it being a necessity to have eight or six cores, it's not necessary as much as having a good four core (quite preferably with hyperthreading) is.

[ARikozuM]

Won't happen for a few years, just like DX12 will be used more frequently. 

[The Sloth]

5 minutes ago, coolkingler1 said:

I don't really know where this came from, people have been repeating it so much since Ryzen's launch, but is it based in reality?

What is your take on it?

ryzen 1600 and 1700 is more targeted towards enthusiasts, ryzen 1700 is a 5960x with fewer lanes, yes games in the future will but for now a good 7700k with 4c/8t and good IPC will be good enough, ryzen 1700 beats the 7700k at almost everything other than gaming. 

[Evolution90]

World might end before we need more than 4 actual cores.

[The Sloth]

Just now, Evolution90 said:

World might end before we need more than 4 actual cores.

most games use more than 4 cores now.....

[Guest]

Just now, nerdslayer1 said:

ryzen 1600 and 1700 is more targeted towards enthusiasts, ryzen 1700 is a 5960x with fewer lanes, yes games in the future will but for now a good 7700k with 4c/8t and good IPC will be good enough, ryzen 1700 beats the 7700k at almost everything other than gaming. 

What about i5's though? Where are they 'placed'? Last I researched, which was a good while ago, more thread weren't really taken advantage of, only in some games.

[Evolution90]

Just now, nerdslayer1 said:

most games use more than 4 cores now.....

Don't mean you actually need them for adequate game performance though.

 

This was the same joke AMD users pushed around with FX back in the day.

[The Sloth]

Just now, coolkingler1 said:

What about i5's though? Where are they 'placed'? Last I researched, which was a good while ago, more thread weren't really taken advantage of, only in some games.

i5s are dead, not worth getting for gaming anymore, ryzen 1600 or 7700k would be a sweet sport when it comes to gaming. 

[ARikozuM]

Just now, nerdslayer1 said:

most games use more than 4 cores now.....

More than 4 threads, but stepping up to a hexa-core doesn't usually gain anything. 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, nerdslayer1 said:

i5s are dead, not worth getting for gaming anymore, ryzen 1600 or 7700k would be a sweet sport when it comes to gaming. 

Really? Well that's a sudden switch...

[The Sloth]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

More than 4 threads, but stepping up to a hexa-core doesn't usually gain anything. 

yup, high IPC paired with 4c/8t is the sweetspot, unless you are streaming while gaming. 

[PCGuy_5960]

Even if games start using more cores, don't expect lower clocked Xeons to be good gaming CPUs. Single core performance will still be very important

[Simon771]

Take a look at Overwatch ... it's using all of Ryzen 16 threads.

So we already have games like that ... but I would say that it will take about 10 years before we can see decent amount of games to support so many cores and threads. 

[ARikozuM]

2 minutes ago, MW3_587786 said:

Of course they will. As we reach the end of moore's law we will have to parallelize instead of increasing the speed of serialization.

Parallelization brings a heap of difficulties just by itself. Look at BF1, for example. 

[vanished]

I think eventually it will happen but I'm still skeptical as to how soon.  Getting 8 core CPUs into more computers is good, but those are still enthusiast level.  I think what will happen is it will cause Intel to eventually start pushing more cores (6 to start) down into the mid-tier offerings (i5), and then after a year or two of that being common, game makers will start optimizing for it, and a few years after that (since it takes years to make a game) you'll start to see the improvements actually show up.

 

What strikes me as odd though is that we've had 8 core consoles for quite some time now, and since there is little if any difference in the architecture, why hasn't this translated into the PC versions being able to use 8 cores effectively?

[Guest]

Well now I feel bad, bought a 7600k a  while before Ryzen came out

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, coolkingler1 said:

Well now I feel bad, bought a 7600k a  while before Ryzen came out

You still have a good gaming CPU. Pair it with some faster memory and you're pretty much going to get similar performance to an R5-1600. 

[The Sloth]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

You still have a good gaming CPU. Pair it with some faster memory and you're pretty much going to get similar performance to an R5-1600. 

but with lower minimums 

[emosun]

who are these people that think gaming pc's need less cores?

more cores = gaming and doing something else at the same time

Less cores = just gaming a bit faster

Someones newer/faster less core cpu could probably beat my dual xeon in benchmarks or games. But my my dual xeon will beat the same machine in benchmarks and games WHILE rendering a video in the background.

[Guest]

19 minutes ago, coolkingler1 said:

Since Ryzen released I have seen this uttered over and over again, before this it was silent, few people said anything about more cores/threads, people with quad cores were still 'okay'.

 

Now suddenly everyone is repeating the mantra of 'you need more cores & threads, games will use them more etc.'

 

I don't really know where this came from, people have been repeating it so much since Ryzen's launch, but is it based in reality?

What is your take on it?

Best thing to do is look at modern games released in the last year then look at how the 6900K is starting to come even to a 7700K even when OC. Also the 2600K has aged much better then the 2500K in modern gaming. 

 

Watch dogs 2, Mafia 3, BF1 these games are using engines that are more modern and less like the old call of duty based engine of using 2 cores only. 

 

Back in the faildozer days consoles only had 3 cores as well and to be honest those cores in bulldozer where close to useless for gaming. Really wish Amd just stuck with Phenom until ryzen came out. 

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, nerdslayer1 said:

but with lower minimums 

Faster RAM helps with minimums which is likely why the results are skewed like that for Ryzen. 

[PCGuy_5960]

4 minutes ago, coolkingler1 said:

Well now I feel bad, bought a 7600k a  while before Ryzen came out

That was a bad purchase. You should have gotten an i7 7700 with a B250 board

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

That was a bad purchase. You should have gotten an i7 7700 with a B250 board

Yeah but it was considerably more expensive, lol. I could still try to switch in a couple of months.

[pyrojoe34]

It's on a game by game basis... Many newer games multithread really well already. I have quite a few games (BF1 is a great example) that equally loads all 12 threads on my CPU perfectly and in my experience more new games use all threads efficiently than games that do not.

 

Having said that, better IPC is still king in gaming (high IPC with 4c/8t is still the sweet spot for pure gaming and beats out 6+ core CPUs with lower IPC most of the time), but everyone saying that it's not likely to happen is either playing older games or just hasn't used a system with higher core counts. It's definitely changing fast and high-core count CPUs are able to be fully utilized by many games.