Games With CPU Bottleneck?

Lately, I'm seeing all of these wonderful, new, and cheap dual core and quad core cpu's, some of them with incredibly ridiculous specs! I just wanted to ask, how often are these cpu's put to the test? How often is the cpu a bottleneck in gaming?

Are there any games or programs out there that require more than a 2 ghz dual core processor?

 

I believe Supreme Commander is pretty good at bottlenecking on the CPU, but I've never played it, nor have I ever even used a computer capable of running it at any playable level, so I couldn't deign to elaborate much further.

 

tf2, css and most source games are really hard on my cpu.

 

Crysis and the newer upcoming games like Fallout3 should max out the CPU.

 

You can also check out this post:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=306354

 

TF2 schools my system only b/c of my speccy CPU.
Hoping to upgrade soon...whether that's before or after Valve adds full dual-core support to the Source Engine, I don't know.

 

CS Source will max your CPU in a full server i dont care how high-spec it is; my E6600 @3ghz was barely enough for me in a full server cs_office; when there are 50 things flying around including corpses your CPU is maxed easily

 

Umm... source plays very well on a 3GHz or less pentium 4. It should NOT be the bottle neck on an E6600 system (unless you're playing at 800*600 in which case u should be in the hundreds of frame rates per second anyway)

Supreme commander is about the only game I'm aware of that will bottleneck a core 2 quad even.

FPS games should mostly be fine unless they have really over-the-top physics engines. It's RTS games that are the bottle neck because of their lower gfx requirements. Upcoming games like Empire Total War might even bottleneck nehalems

 

define "very well"
i tested it with my desktop c2d because it was stock 2.6 and CS lagged on a 50-man server so i OCd it and looked at the difference and only at about 3.0 was it nice and smooth with lots of people on the screen, even then the fps would drop; the same thing on every laptop ive ever tested cs:source on

when you have 20 people on screen, corpses flying, barrels flying, filing cabinets flying, misc objects, grenades, this takes up an immense amount of CPU cycles, CS:S is CPU bound at any resolution up to 1600x1200 on a full 40+ person server, and if you want to play on a 64-man server with anything less than a 2.4 c2d, forget about it your fps will plummet

some maps are much better than others; cs_office is probably the most intense map physics-wise (probably by far), because its so cramped and there is so much stuff, especially in the inner office with the hosties its just a nightmare for your CPU when there are 20 people or more in there all throwing grenades

other than that, yes most FPSs are GPU-bound (stalker, quake 4 etc.), but the most fun effects require lots of physics, aka driving a jeep through a house in Crysis or tossing a grenade into a shack full of stuff all with its own physics properties; i couldnt even play crysis until i upgraded to a c2d cpu

again, the trend is toward MORE cpu usage, alot more, physics are awesome and they're only going to get more and more complex, games like crysis and cs:source are revolutionary in terms of physics use and there's no going back, so on that note i would recommend the fastest CPU you can get your hands on, especially since most games arent optimized for multi-thread

 

CS:Source will probably be quite CPU intensive, but it's coded to use multi-cores so it probably won't max. My T8300 gets me good framerates at 1360x850 even in at 64 player de_dust2 server.

TF2 on the other hand only makes use of 1 core, and it easily maxes the first core.

 

i thought Source Engine does support MultiCores, but not in an efficient way..

 

maybe episode 2 does, but definintely not counter-strike

i remember reading something about a dual-core patch for CS about 2 years ago but it never materialized

 

thought id ressurect this thread to add i played Zombie Mod for CS today for the first time and it brought my computer to it's knees, im talking 5=10 FPS at certain spots with an 8800GTS, there are over 40 people in the server usuallly and it simply destroys your CPU, just to make sure i was CPU bottlenecked i dropped the resolution from 1440x900 to 720xsomething and the FPS didnt change at all it kept plummeting at certain spots

so yea a slow CPU will kill you in source games with lots of players, mine is a 1.8Ghz Core 2 Duo btw, id say a 3.0Ghz Core 2 Extreme would be the minimum to run it smoothly at 50fps

at one point i think there were about 30 people all firing their guns on full auto next to each other (on top of the roof), the mod is awesome fun, i forget what the roof map is called but its quite intense, basically everyone starts out on the bottom of the map and then has to make their way to the safehouse at the very top of the rooftops, and 1 person starts as a zombie, and all hell breaks loose; its great fun

for some reason though the control-alt-delete task manager never shows my CPU maxing out, even though it clearly is in-game, im still investigating on that, this is only for cs:source, other games like crysis and stalker show the cpu maxing in task manager

 

I've yet to have anything come close to max out my E8400 on my desktop, including Crysis.

 

Ultimate CPU bottlenecking game:

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

 

Crysis does not have a CPU bottleneck. I can run it with a T7500 and the CPU utilization is around 70%.

 

The CS Zombie mod maps are poorly created. The mappers most of the time didn't compile the shaders and lighting into the map, they also don't know how to use clips, or let Vrad run it's course to lower load of player's PC's by clipping things that aren't visible by the player.

One other problem with CS:S and the havok physics engine used in it, is that things too easily collide, and when multiple world physics objects collide it makes your CPU usage max out since the engine is erroring, this happens ALOT in zm maps for CS:S because players often block moving physics objects like gates/doors causing your CPU to max out. In this case it really won't matter how powerful your PC is, when it's erroring like this, it will slow it down considerably.

 

Turn-based strategy games can also be heavy CPU bottleneckers. Civilization III is the one I'm most familiar with that's a huge CPU bottleneck. It'll run just fine on any old video card from 2000, and will run okay on mid-sized maps with a fast Pentium II, but max out the settings and it'll bring a 3 GHz Core to its knees with multi-minute turn times. Civilization IV is similar; I'm not sure if it's quite as bad though as it usually crashes due to memory instabilities first (hence why I consider it more poorly programmed). Galactic Civilizations II probably also hits this problem, but it's multithreaded and has more of a focus on performance than graphics (as Civ IV has), so it won't have quite as much of a bottleneck on a CPU. I'm sure it will still be CPU-bottlenecked in Gigantic universes, though.

Among FPS, Battlefield 1942 is another that is CPU bottlenecked. I noticed this awhile back on my Pentium IV; the GeForce MX 440 could handle max graphics well enough, but the Frames Per Second plummeted when I increased the AI to the maximum of 64. This is why newer Battlefield games, such as BF2, limit the AI in single-player mode to 16-bots - in BF1942 (and presumably Vietnam, which I don't play as much) the CPU was the bottleneck most of the time since it supported up to 64 bots. I disagree heartily with EA's decision to limit the AI, but then again, it's EA.

The other game I've run into with a significant CPU bottleneck is Medieval II Total War. It's not bad in the campaign mode, but when you start having field battles with 3000+ units you run increasing chances of CPU bottlenecks due to the sheer numbers of units in play. More units also increases GPU strain, but as you go really high the CPU bottleneck will be more noticeable.

So which require > 2 GHz Core 2 processor? CivIV and GalCiv2 will be just fine. BF1942 should be fine as well - 1.5 GHz would probably show noticeable bottlenecking affects, though. Civilization III needs the fastest it can get - I've had 5 minute AI turn times on my 2.2 GHz Core 2. It's a 2001 game, but it would certainly max out an E8600 (3.33 GHz) with the right settings. And M2TW will run fine with a 2 GHz Core, but on the really big battles you'll notice a difference with a faster processor.

Note that of these games, only GalCiv2 is multithreaded - multithreading helps a good deal with avoiding CPU bottlenecks.

OTOH, some games do remarkably well with a slow processor. Halo runs just fine (albeit somewhat CPU bottlenecked) on a 600 MHz Core 2, and Trackmania Nations Forever (a 2008 racing game) still gets 20 FPS on a 600 MHz Core 2. So it really depends on the game.

 

It's 70% of both cores, so it would have to be better optomised to use the rest of the second core, it doesn't mean it isn't bottlenecking on the CPU. I also only see around 70-80% on my Turion X2 @ 2Ghz, but it definately bottlenecks on the CPU in some areas like the Harbour where there are a lot of enemies. Framerates get dragged into the mid 20s and lowering resolution doesn't help, so Crysis definately benefits from a fast CPU.

 

Oddly enough, my old AMD Athlon 1.8GHz could run CS:S Zombie Mod fine on a 42 player server. It didn't have great fps, but it was definitely smooth enough to play without noticing the lagginess of it all.

I don't think that CS:S is actually maxing out on the CPU and not displaying it. It's possible more like another program is preventing CS:S from fully utilising the core. I had a similar problem with TF2.

Basically TF2 would use up 95% of my first core but the fps was quite smooth. But some time back I noticed that my fps was actually quite crap, and that the task manager showed TF2 was only utilising around 60% of the core. Later on I found the culprit. It seems like any program attached to my desktop (Rainmeter, Rainlendar2, Object Dock) would prevent TF2 from utilising the first core fully. The moment I closed it, my CPU usage for TF2 shot up and my fps was smoother.

It may or may not be the same problem that you are experiencing, but since they are both Source engines, what the heck. Try closing all unnecessary background applications and run CS:S again.

 

Fallout 3 uses 50% on each core for me. game is well optimised you know..

 

no i always have task manager running and my cpu is about 97% free when i start up steam and i regularly alt-tab and make sure nothing else is eating up the cycles; task manager HAS to be reporting the cpu usage incorrectly because i am most certainly CPU limited; i think with Clear Sky i had the same problem and it wouldnt report it right either, because they put in 10x more people in the same maps as the original Stalker, plus faction wars, its a huge CPU hog now