You don't need it if you DO play games. I'm running an 11 year old Xeon, that maxes every modern game at 2560x1600 on a 1070. GPU is WAY more important than CPU in gaming.
depends on the game. plenty of popular esports titles will bottleneck on the CPU with even a low end graphics card.
And yeah, the GPU is never begged while playing, but multiple CPU cores definitely are.
Also, emulation is another big place where CPU bottlenecking is a thing. Look at Dolphin (Gamecube/Wii), Citra (Wii U), and yuzu (Switch), they're all CPU bound. Folks in the various subreddits will ask why their new GPU isn't netting them a higher framerate, and it's because the GPU is almost not even used (though in some cases with better graphical effects, shaders, etc. they can be beneficial)
it is hard to find benchmarks to show this however. the reputable sites mainly focus on 1080p because this is where the difference between cpus is most visible. doesn't mean there isn't a meaningful difference at higher resolutions, it just isn't as good a way to show what they are trying to show in a cpu review.
> There is zero reason to be upgrading between generations unless you're just burning money.
agreed, the speedup is almost never worth such a short upgrade cycle, especially for consumers. but this is moving the goalposts given the thread's context.
It's definitely confusing, since there's a mention of 4K elsewhere...
You are correct that most games don't use that much CPU. Most titles will run comfortably with an Intel I3 from the past three generations or so, provided there are no bottlenecks in the GPU. The CPU will be the bottleneck, but if you are getting sufficient framerates, so what?
Modern CPUs are insanely powerful. Even then, I moved to Ryzen - for the above mentioned titles.
I guess you mean 1440p - which you could maybe label as 2.6k. But I don't think there is any such designation. Calling it WQHD is probably the right thing.
(playing games on a 1070 and a 6 year old Xeon and feeling the lack of single-threaded performance)
Additionally, the games listed as problematic ran great on a Dell laptop equipped with an 8th-gen i7 and a GTX 1050 mobile. At least, they ran great for like a minute or two until the thermal throttling kicked in. So given that my HTPC build does have issues, and it has a slightly better GPU and much worse processor, I'm inclined to think the processor is the problem.
Unfortunately, I don't think there's much point trying to get a better processor than that for the old LGA 1150 board, when I could spend only slightly more cash on some DDR4 RAM, a B450 motherboard, and maybe an older Ryzen to be upgraded to one of these Zen 3 ones in a few years when prices have dropped.