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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

There is a huge gamer market. Every hardcore gamer wants to have the fastest cpu avaiable.

Those who can afford it, will buy it.

edit: yes, it is definitely overkill for most if not all avaiable games, but in a certain scene "overkill" is considered awesome

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It's definitely not for gamers, even silly "I have to have the best thing" gamers. Games are considered "lightly threaded" in these sorts of conversations, so you're looking for max boost clock / IPC.

However, Lots of the youtube influencer ruling class will buy it, in part because of what you said ("those who can afford it..").

The real legitimate consumer base for this are people whose work productivity is held back by compute loads that are embarrassingly parallel. If you spend a lot of your time waiting for a (well threaded) compiler to finish, or blender to render something out, or whatever.

to be fair YT and twitch "influencer ruling class" uses all threads for video encoding (you need software encoders for best quality)

At least for Premiere it's not as useful as you'd think: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StJssAQZlZc&t=38s

(at least for now, I don't work in that industry but it may just be a code quality issue)

Twitch / "Influencer" video gamers aren't using Premiere for videos.

Twitch streamers need a "streaming" solution. They play live, and instantly react to the crowd. If someone pays for an emote or something, the Twitch-streamer is expected to look on camera and say thank you to the donor (and maybe repeat the message that the donor paid for).

This means that a Twitch streamer's computer MUST encode the gameplay live. Traditionally, Twitch streamers would buy two computers, one to play video games, and a 2nd computer to process the video stream and upload it to Twitch.

With the advent of 16+ core computers, Twitch streamers have begun to simply buy one computer, lock 8-cores to the video game, and then lock 8-cores to the Twitch encoder.

Presumably, something like a Threadripper (24+ cores) could process the video stream for better quality and lower bandwidth. Maybe live VP9 encoding, for example (8-cores for the video game, 16-cores or more for the encoder)

I know what Twitch is, I said YouTube. Someone else said Twitch alongside YT.

streaming is a thing on YT

ffmpeg is a much better way to look at video encoding. Codec libraries themselves have varying ability to use multiple cores effectively.

I'm not sure modern game engines make good use of large numbers cores, because most consumers don't have that many.

Intel chips are still competitive for single-threaded performance, from what i can tell https://www.pcworld.com/article/3453946/amd-threadripper-397...

You could host your own Eve Online universe in your bedroom.

On a virtual machine cluster, while you use a few of those cores to play a game from the same PC

EVE Online is written in python and can only leverage a single core per zone =)

Good thing the Eve Online universe has lots of zones to use all those cores (~8000 solar systems, iirc).;

Consoles have 8 and are about to have 8 cores / 16 threads. Multi core utilization on android is essential to running at lower clock speeds and not thermal throttling. Engines and graphics APIs are catching up and there are less singlethread bottlenecks than there used to be.

For most current games, anything more than 6 cores is overkill according to the benchmarks.

With the next console gen being based on Ryzen instead of the much less efficient Jaguar architecture, maybe 8 cores might be better used.

Nobody wants a 64 core CPU for games. Single core performance is the most important factor by far since most games aren't really optimized for parallel computing.

Does the CPU actually matter that much for modern AAA games? (I haven't played any AAA game in a looooooooooong time.)

I help people build PCs sometimes and peoples first pass at picking components almost always overspends on cpu and underspends on gpu. For any fixed budget you will usually get (much) better perf by getting the low-mid range ryzen 3/5 or i3/i5 cpus and spending the difference on a better graphics card.

Most games are not particularly CPU intensive (although there are exceptions like Ashes of the Singularity which actually does usually get bottlenecked by the CPU unless you have a really high end one)

Not really. You run the game loop on one core and physics simulation / sounds / world streaming on a handful of other ones. It's more about the maximum single core performance which is not that different on a $150 Ryzen. Going to the most expensive CPU on the market probably only gets you 5 FPS more compared to the top end GPUs that scale rendering in parallel like a dream and can give you 100+ more FPS.

And physic simulation is something trivial?

Physics simulation in most current AAA games is pretty trivial for low-mid range current cpus yes. There are outliers of course.

Amd has started uping the thread counts with the ryzen processors only. And now that Ryzen has started being adopted by gamers and streamers newer games are getting better at utilising these cores. with current generation games extra threads won't help but newer titles it is going to

LinusTechTips tester it, and, IIRC, the answer is CPU bottlenecks aren’t really a thing anymore.

Because "functional decomposition", a method of threading where you allocate threads per function like physics or rendering, fell out of fashion. Modern game engines instead use a task system where tasks are spun off a main thread and asynchronously computed.

They sure are a thing, because programmers. For example for a stutter free game RDR2 needed 6 cpu cores up to a patch one month ago thanks to bad console first optimizations.

The key word was really. There are obviously times where CPU bottlenecks are a thing, but for the most part, they’re not.

I just upgraded my CPU and kept my GPU, an older Nvidia 960 GTX. My CPU was a Q6600 and now I have a Ryzen 2700X. CPU matters so much it's amazing. Some games are heavy on the GPU and some are heavy on the CPU. Depends on what kind of things they have going on.

You'd be hard pressed to find a current cpu that would be the bottleneck in most AAA titles though. The Q6600 was released in 2006.

I haven't had any experience with cheap current generation CPUs. Have you any experience with ones such as an Intel Celerons that are about $30 on Amazon?

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/...

If you want a high 240hz refresh rate @ 1080p, having i7 9700k or i9 9900k is what you want.

the 64 core threadripper is the worst gaming cpu amd sells almost.

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