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Comment by k_sze | Hacker News Reader

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.

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