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Comment by gsnedders | Hacker News Reader

At least to me, it always seems like the differences in gaming performance between mid-to-high end CPUs are relatively small, and frequently dominated by the differences between GPUs. Given a fixed budget, does it actually make sense from a gaming point-of-view to put the money into a high-end CPU any more?

(Aside from gaming, there's definitely plenty of wins from going to higher end CPUs, but I'm curious about the gaming case specifically.)

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It depends on what sort of games you will be playing. For some simulation and related games such as Factorio and the like the CPU can make a large difference.

At the high end, factorio is one of those games (the other being flight sim) that also gains a lot from faster memory iirc.

Though at the low end, factorio is also a really well optimised game and can run a 100spm factory at 60ups pretty comfortably on a mid range cpu. It's only the large multiplayer games or megabases where it starts to hit performance limits.

Cities Skylines is probably the best example of a game where the average player has big gains in performance in regular play they could get from a cpu upgrade.

I think you're underestimating factorio significantly. There are 20kspm bases that are run at 60 ups. I doubt most people will even feel the game performance start to degrade before 1kspm.

> There are 20kspm bases that are run at 60 ups.

There are, but megabase (>1k spm) territory is where players start making design decisions around ups impact like avoiding large logistics zones or avoiding heat pipes.

I had the understanding that once you move from 1080p to 4K then the GPU becomes the bottleneck for most AAA games. Pro gamers will probably stick to 1080p and a 144hz monitor.

Most fps pro gamers have switched to 240hz. I see a fewon 165hz, some on 300+.

Esports games are very greatly optimized to run at high frame rates. You don’t need a 3080 to get infinite FPS in CSGO

CS:GO is also almost 10 years old, running on the venerable Source engine. While it was a nice graphical update over CS: Source, it wasn't exactly winning any beauty contests.

Your assumption lines up with the general PC gaming advice.

There are a few games that do strongly benefit from a better CPU, but those are the exception, and they still have significant dismissing returns

Not really true in my experience for multiplayer games. Pretty much every multiplayer game is CPU and memory bound and any GPU limitation can be mitigated by just lowering settings. Nothing can be done to compensate for weaker CPU performance unfortunately. If I had to skimp on GPU or CPU I would pick GPU every time.

It depends on how much the game is CPU heavy, specially single core performance on some games makes a big difference. High end CPUs tend to have a higher single core performance.

You are pretty much right on that point, both a 5600X from AMD or a 12600k from Intel won't bottleneck a 3080Ti or 3090 when gaming.

Only true if you are not playing esports games and trying to push maximum frame rate, such as for a 360hz display, or one of the upcoming 480hz ones.

Fwiw my simple reaction time is 220ms on a basic 60hz display vs 170ms on a top end 360hz, so being able to push those frames has a significant quality of life delta, even though I’m unable to hit 360hz in most games due to cpu bottlenecks on my system.

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