8 Core Prossercors Becoming a Prerequisite?

For running up coming games on Very High Extreme Settings.

With these upcoming AAA titles recommended specifications being made public, it seems so.

Now glad I held out of buying a Haswell 4770K. I feel sorry for the one who did not.

 

What are these upcoming AAA titles?

 

Watch Dogs and Mordor.

 

Errr what? 8 cores for upcoming games? Who said so.

 

what resolution do you want to game at?

pretty important piece missing right there.

if your gaming at 720 or 1080 single display these is practically no way in hell any of these games should need 8 cores.

if your running quad sli and 4 k triple screens. then heckies yea you might need a quadx2 to push all them pixels and all them graphic effects and a huge amount of processor overhead to keep it all going at 120 fps.

i think what processor you will need is more down to what monitor setup and card setup you want to rock. nm how much eye candy you bleed for not everyone is trying to max every gfx option in everything.

 

Well planning on treating my self to a new cpu for my birthday should do well just in time for watchdogs also feel its bottlenecking me now in few recent games.

 

nope, far from it. most games can't even utilize 4 cores properly.

 

Yeah, that's the same story over and over, they recommend a quad core and the game uses 2 or 3 cores in best circumstances. I won't believe until I'll see with my eyes.

 

It doesn't work like that.

The CPU does not have to work harder just because the GPU is pushing out more pixels. That's the job of the GPU. That's why we have 3d graphics accelerators in the first place. It simply wouldn't work very well if the CPU had to work harder as well.

You could run a game at 1280x720 capped at 60 fps and then run the same game at 3840x2160 capped at 60 fps. The CPU will do the same amount of work

 

Well you need a beffoer porce3ssor to not bottle neck your gpus, i guess should have been the more proper way to say it. nvidia are more cpu bound then amd typically. but what else but quad sli would need?

either way.

 

Higher frame rate, yes that needs a better CPU to accompany it. Higher details too, like water and shadows, can use more CPU too.

But higher resolution? Nah, that job is simply offloaded to the GPU. Whilst I'll admit I don't fully understand CPU driver overhead (especially after the lastest nvidia beta drivers from the last few days), as I understand it, it's more the drivers themselves than the resolution you're running at.

I can show you CPU usage graphs of me running through something like GTA IV completely maxed, capped at 30 fps, in both 1280x720 res and then 3840x2160 (downsampled of course lol, I don't have real 4k monitor!). I think we'll find the CPU usage is nearly identical on both runs.

The reason I bring up GTA IV, is because there used to be a lot of folks that though you needed a better CPU to run the game at a higher resolution, but it just isn't true at all.

 

GTA IV is a joke, the game is coded by a 5 year old, I wouldn't use that as a benchmark for anything.

 

Well even if it was a joke, then it still doesn't use more CPU for higher resolution.

OK fine, any other game then.

 

OP
why loling at 4770k, its a beasty cpu. I dont regret a penny for it, got mine quite cheap ~ 260€ and good OC'er too. Atm im running at 4.6ghz for the sake of it


That turbo 8core will have the same per-core performance. Actually 4770K will be faster because it clocks higher.
8 core has a base 3ghz at full load (140w), I kinda doubt it will OC above 4.2ghz, otherwise that TDP will jump through the roof.

http://wcc ftech.com/intel-haswelle-engineering-sample-8-cores-3-ghz-clock-speed-spotted-features-140w-tdp-2133-mhz-ddr4-memory/


And speaking of next gen, they will be mostly 8 threaded, not 8cored that would be 16 threads by intel scenario.


@fenderjaguar
By 3-4gpu system the cpu needs to work harder to feed those gpus properly, higher multi monitor reso also adds some extra overhead, more data flies through pcie <gpu>driver<ram> cpu.


GTA4 is apparently API bottleneck, newest nvidia driver has up to 20fps speedups, 2-3 users reported it. I didnt try it yet, but I think I will soon

 

Based on articles from dsog games can barely use quad cores, let alone make use of hyperthreading properly. Exaggerated requirements that just show the games will need brute power rather than having CPUs utilised to their potential as good as possible.

 

I've still not installed the new drivers, but have games like Saints Row II, Just Cause and GTAIV installed again to see if there is any difference, strangely enough though i was getting 60-80fps on GTAIV with everything maxed so don't know if the game has already been improved through drivers or even W8.1

As for needing 8 threads in games now?
I'm sure you will be able to still get them working on a older quad core, but i doubt you will get ideal performance, but thankfully there seems to be less and less support for dual core CPU's

If the new consoles are using 8 cores to run the game and the OS (and they are not doing it via brute-force) then i don't see why anyone would expect anything less from the PC version, unless your asking for a inferior PC version so you don't have to upgrade.

 

No need for an 8-core CPU yet and that's why Intel still sell 4-core/8-threads CPUs.

Watch dogs and Shadow of Mordor CPU requirements are just for marketing.Same goes for their RAM requirements.I still remember Metro2033 requirements(8GB Ram).The game ran perfectly fine on my 4GB system back then.So don't even give a damn for their CPU/Ram requirements, only GPU requirements reflect the truth.

 

Watch Dogs and Shadow Of Mordor don't have requirements for 8 core Intel CPU's though, they both have requirements for an 8 core AMD CPU and 4 core 8 threaded Intel CPU.

I doubt it's for marketing, while it does create headlines it also makes people cancel pre-orders.

 

Yeap agree and they wont do for a good while. Just because the new consoles have 8 core don't mean the PC will require 8 core to get the same results. GPU drives games and i see the PC mid-high end - enthusiast gpu destroying all gpu's in all consoles for long-time yet. PC games will not require 6 cores until 5 years minimum or more.

 

I'll believe it when the games are released and I see some benchmarks, as it is I'm guessing anyone with a current I5 or higher will be just fine.