Is the importance of a CPU in gaming underratted?

This is something that I have noticed more since moving from a gaming Laptop to a mini itx. My Obsidian has the intel i7-4790k at 4.0 Ghz. When Turbo is enabled it will automatically raise all Cores to 4400 MHz if everything is within the manufacturers thermal and power safe zones.

I disabled turbo the other day and noticed stuttering in far Cry 4 and more slow downs in Renegade X Beta 4. I have the GTX 980 and play at 1920 x 1080 res. Maybe it is due to having a more powerful GPU than I would ever have on the laptop but I'm noticing much smother performance in games when Turbo is enabled vs when it is disabled. It is not always a frame rate difference but more the lack of stutter or smooth frames during explosions or more hectic game play. For example on Renegade X when there are tank battles and lots of explosions I noticed slow downs that did not occur when Turbo had been enabled. Has anyone else noticed this?

 

I believe the most evident thing with higher clock CPU is the minimum frame rate on game. Also running SLI in my case, any bump in CPU frequency lead to improved SLI performance/scaling

 

Makes sense. 1080p is not asking much of a 980, so I'd imagine you'd be CPU-bound some of the time, esp. in a single-threaded DX9 UE3 game like Renegade X.

 

Depends. Generally resolution does not have much to do with CPU load, as the instructions are mostly the same for different res. But if res is low the GPU would spend less time rendering which might give the CPU more breathing room as well, especially when there's minimal frame buffering.

 

I am more surprised that you managed to cram a 980 on a laptop!!!!! .

But seriously CPU is very important, just compare AC Unity on the PS4 (better GPU) and the Xbox One (higher CPU clocks). The PS4 looks better, but you can see it rendering people on the street when they are needed the XBox version renders far more objects and people straight out of the box than the PS4

 

Far Cry 4 also shows a huge difference depending on the CPU, I'm so glad I went all out now. Ive heard that the i790k turbos at about 4.2 Ghz if all cores are used, if that is the case I don't know how that makes such a difference to the game, its not a huge increase in clock speed. I'm sure I noticed it hitting 4.4ghz on each core though.

 

Speaking of cramming desktop GPUs into laptops, isn't that technically foreseeable already? We do have laptop systems that hold dual MXM GPUs and ~150TPD CPUs. If something with that kind of thermal density can be put under control, a Maxwell GPU which has way lower thermal density and not much more total power would be fine?

 

As far as I'm concerned that has lready been done with the 980M and benchmarks Ive seen on Youtube show 980M in Sli out perform a single GTX 980 in most cases. This is why it would have been a great time to embrace the Mxm format, truly powerful and upgradeable gaming laptops with near Desktop performance. Finally we get a really amazing mobile GPU and they want to switch to BGA.

 

It's still better to use one big GPU if possible. SLI/CF compatibility, latency, and maybe power saving.

 

No laptop has Haswell-E

 

On Dx12 games forget about CPU bottleneck for good.

 

I was referring to SNB-E(P). The highest TDP was 150W on i7 3970X and E5 2687W.

 

Haswell-E's increased thermal density means it's much harder to cool despite the same TDP. 3970X can be handled by a Hyper 212 EVO just fine. 5960X requires a closed loop liquid cooler or high-end dual tower dual fan air cooler.

As far as mobile GPUs are concerned, going too far over 100W passes the knee of the efficiency curve. We already saw that with 880M and M295X, both 125W cards which overheat and throttle at stock.

 

For HW-E CPU, yes. i7 Quad should be good enough for now on mobile though.

For GPU, the thermal density is still low compared to those hot CPUs. On existing MXM chassis built for 100W or lower cards, those high powered ones do cause problems. But bumping it to 150W or so doesn't change the picture that much if it was kept in mind from the beginning of the design. The system would have to be thick (maybe 2~2.5"/5~6cm), which is against the general trend in this market. Hopefully there are still enough people willing to pay for those large DTRs.

CPU is not only used for controlling rendering. AI, physic or game logic can cause problem as well. And that's a even worse kind of CPU bottleneck because you can't dial it down.

 

Even the AW 18 and Clevo P377SM-A could not handle 880M, and those are well over 2" thick with as good of cooling as you'd find in that form factor

 

I had to mention that I'm not talking bout ULV processors and Pentiums I'm sure all i5-s since Sandy will do the job pretty good and i3 -s will get nice boost anyways even though all they are dual cores.
You can call it just my opinion.

 

To answer the title: Yes, I believe a lot of people underestimate the impact CPU's have on gaming and other intensive applications. Some simply do not understand the exponential increase in physics in newer games requiring more CPU power, and along with that, more GPU power.

The next generation of games is going to be very demanding. Times are definitely changing. I would not cheap out on a CPU if you plan to keep a system for more than 12-18 months. We will see more and more people having to upgrade their CPU's over the next 1-3 years, due mainly in part to the fact that graphics processors will perform 2x+ faster than before (e.g. Pascal).

A lot of people I speak with honestly have no idea the capabilities of Pascal and other new architectures. They can (and probably will) squeeze huge amounts of performance out of it over the next 2 years. Just look what they've done with 28nm over the past 3 years and compare it to where they are now with the Titan X (GM200).

You should be able to push that 4790k fairly far. It's a great CPU. You just need to cool it.

 

It is a great CPU, I just leave it on automatic Turbo and it gets to about 4.4 Ghz on each Core which is enough for me. My case is quite small but I have a Hydro Series H55 liquid cooler and it is near silent. I have read about quite a lot of cases where people have quite high temps with that CPU though. With Turbo disabled, temps max out around 60 - 65C but with Turbo enabled, it can go up to about 78C but usually less. I can play demanding games on Ultra and not hear a thing from this computer, that is very important in my books.

I'm sure it would run cooler if I had a bigger case but Ive always been a fan of compact everything whether I really need it or not.

 

LinusTechTips just did a sub-zero ultimate cooling build with a 4790k. He pushes it to a stable 5GHz at 6-16C under load, lol. Just insane.

 

For current gen mainstream AAA titles, yes. But there so many AI/physics designs that would benefit gameplay and devs are scared of using them because of the lowest denominator.

Then there is also the CPU-GPU communication problem which the PC club never cares about, and whenever someone mentions it people get angry.

 

As someone who mainly plays games with an AI involved of some sort (whether rivals in a strategy game, including multiplayer which usually has AI factions, or AI enemies in a shooter), I've been saying that the importance of the CPU is underrated for years. There comes a point when a GPU is a limiting factor, but usually it's fairly easy to dial back the graphics settings or the resolution. When the CPU is the bottleneck, you're often left waiting with no alternatives. Sometimes you can dial back the number of AI rivals, but sometimes you can't, and even when you can fewer rivals may mean less fun.

For pure rendering, I don't care a whole lot. Sure, DX12 will remove a lot of the bottlenecks there. But I'm not buying a good CPU to help with that. I'm buying a good CPU so the AI calculations are quick and are less of a bottleneck.

 

I just noticed another area where my CPU was the only thing that gave me better performance. I installed a simple Mod in GTA V that allows you to have radio on foot as opposed to only in cars. Immediately after installation I noticed that I was getting severe slow downs and stuttering. After enabling Hyperthreading in Bios, the slow downs vanished completely.

 

The mod is broken then. Why would a radio mod cause so much CPU load.

 

I'm not sure but I noticed a similar problem with GTA IV and the Mods as well. Maybe others don't notice because hyperthreading is always enabled by default or maybe it's just one of those random things.

 

That is a really weird mod if its doing that. You shouldn't need to enable it in bios.

 

I probably wouldn't have noticed any issues if I hadn't disabled HT a few days before installing the Mod due to experimentation. I also remember getting better performance on a laptop with the Mods after a CPU upgrade.

 

Ohhhh, you disabled it yourself, that explains a lot haha.