What makes a CPU good for gaming ?

[DG Result]

What do you guys think when it comes to gaming ?

I am asking this question, not because i cant google it, but because i want to see what other people here think.

 

P.S. more info is always good

 

[knightslugger]

High IPC.

[Swealteek]

1 minute ago, knightslugger said:

High IPC.

And many GHz ****

 

And no your 9590 at 5GHz is not the best for gaming...

[stealth80]

IPC > SPEED> THREADS

 

That order, but you want a blend of each really, aka no point having a 7ghz processor on one thread (ok will work fine for older games) and likewise no point having 32 threads at 1ghz, IPC is important for all 

[TheGlenlivet]

As stated, IPC and speed as well as price and socket/chipset support for motherboards that will provide PCI lanes and slots for GPUs.

[ExplosiveSloths]

Would depend on the game or engine

 

 

though most like IPC/High clock speeds

 

some prefer IPC, clock speed & cores/threads

good example would be universe sandbox

 

[Jurrunio]

IPC > Frequency > Cores > Threads. These have to be balanced though.

[bimmerman]

Like everyone has said, IPC>Frequency>Cores>Threads. You can make up for low IPC by raising Frequency with overclocking, to some degree.

 

Honestly, most any desktop i5/i7/AMD CPU out there from the last 8-10 years (whenever C2Quad and first gen Core i5/7 came out) will support most games at 60fps when paired with a resolution-appropriate GPU. The GPU matters far more than CPU does, once you exceed a minimum capability threshold for the CPU.

 

If you want silly amounts of fps above 60, or playing at max settings, or are trying to do more than just game with the computer, or driving multiple GPUs, then there are reasons to get flashier and more feature-rich CPUs.

 

But on the whole? Any desktop CPU made in the last few years is "good for gaming". Your GPU is orders of magnitude more important to your gaming than your CPU.

 

Source: until last year, I played games on a non-overclocked i7-950, enjoyably, at 60+fps when my GPU could do it. If you believe the forums, that CPU is potato quality nowadays, but that's what you get from 14 year olds talking about CPUs that came out when they were....5.

[pyrojoe34]

Everyone here is oversimplifying the answer. The truth is much more complicated than " IPC > Frequency > Cores > Threads".

 

For example:

 

-Some games are able to parallelize really well, in those cases a function of IPC*clock*threads is the best CPU (higher value is better). That is to say that a CPU with low IPC and clock speeds but a ton of threads can still beat out a super high IPC CPU.

-For tasks that can parallelize well but the threads can't efficiently share resources/pipelines (like hyperthreading does), then the equation is IPC*clock*cores.

-For tasks that can only use a single thread at a time then the answer is IPC*clock.

-In the case of a game that can multi-thread decently but has certain functions that are single threaded bottlenecks, then the answer depends on a lot of things. You need to know where the bottleneck lies (are the single threaded tasks "waiting" for the dependents to finish processing? or are all the available threads being used and ops are waiting for a free thread? Or are the tasks limited to just 2/4/6/etc threads? In these cases (most cases) you have to consider all the variables simultaneously.

-Now there are plenty of other things to consider. Do the processes require a large low latency cache and it's not the "processing" itself that's the issue but rather data flow to the right place that's the issue? In that case you might be better off with a CPU with large caches (L1/2/3) even if the IPC*clock itself is slower.

 

Even with these few points I'm still way oversimplifying the issue. As others have said, a general trend is that modern games tend to prefer a high IPC*clock given at least 4 cores are available. This isn't true with every game though, or even true without considering that different settings and framerates can favor different setups.

 

My long-winded point is... never judge a CPU (or any microprocessor) by its public specs. Real-world tests, with your specific use case, is the only way to know what is better hardware for you.

[xg32]

high(est) single threaded performance, 4c/8t minimum, pref 6c/12t or more