Processor and gaming

How important is the processor while gaming? Is it worth the upgrade to go from the 1.5ghz(t5250) to the 2.0ghz(t7250)?

thanks

 

The processor processes everything and sends it out.

you wont see a massive difference in the processor performance, but some, since the graphics card is the bottleneck (unless its an 8800 GTX). but if you've the money, go ahead.

 

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6127698/index.html?type=tech&page=4

this might be kind of old, but this is how much the processor matters in battlefield 2 (not much).

For games like SIMS 2 and RTS games, the processor is gonna play a bigger role. But usually first person shooters are GPU dependent.

 

supreme commander would be the most processor necessary game i can think of

 

I'd base your CPU more off of what tasks you will be doing aside from gaming.

For gaming, on pretty much any notebook out there now, the GPU will most definitely be the bottleneck as Crimsonman said.

 

BTW, what video card are you getting and what games are you interested in playing?

 

don't forget that u r actually getting 2 cpu's in one, so basivly, correct me if im wrong, u're getting 3.0ghz vs 4.0ghz. i don't think u'll b able to notice it, but i'd rather get 1.8 between those two extremes.

 

the problem is that alot of older games only use one core.

And its not a good idea to compare mhz/ghz. The core 2 duo are much faster per/hz than pentium 4's.

One core of a 1.6ghz core 2 duo performs better than a 3.2ghz pentium 4. The benchmarks are on anandtech.com somewhere.

 

well, according to u 1.5 ghz that utilizes jsut one core is still better tha p4 1.5ghz.... and older games are older, so 1.5 should be just fine then...

 

yep, im just saying that most games out now only use one core

 

That's not true, dual-core processors do not work that way. You don't double the clock speed.

Most games are single-threaded so they will run on one of the cores.

 

even when games are multi-threaded one core will have to do more work than another core. In example: If a game has 2 threads. Thread one will render the game entirely and the 2nd thread only renders how the weather should be in that game, then the core which handles the 2nd thread has almost nothing to do.

That's why you almost never will get 200% speed compared to single core processors.

 

Go study benchmark scores between older and newer processors. It's NOT always the clock speed. My Pentium M 760 that runs at a stock 2.0 Ghz can blow a 3.2 Ghz Pentium 4 out of the water -- and both processors are single core. What more a Core 2 Duo running at 2.0 Ghz?

CPU dependent games are mostly RTS games because the CPU has to carry out more tasks such as AI for individual units which can be numerous in RTS games. Anything that doesn't involve graphics is what the CPU handles.

 

A good example of RTS games that are CPU-hungry monsters are Supreme Commander and the Total War series (Lots of units on screen potentially, can't remember if they tax CPU or GPU more).

According to the gamespot hardware guide for Supreme Commander (if it's not a reliable source I apologise) this is one of the few games that likes dual-core processors and absolutely loves GHz. Although the GPU is important in this game a good dual-core CPU for laptops makes big battles less unresponsive and smoother.

 

yo, why don't u go study english?! what is ur problem and what is ur post about?! (I was not stating anything, just coming to a conclusion) if u got plenty of time to look up pictures, props to u

 

Some people are making the common mistake of thinking of MHz or GHz as a "speed".

Hertz is a measure of cycles/sec
MHz is millions of cycles/sec
GHz is billions of cycles/sec

Some processors do more in a cycle than others do...

Thus the size of the GHz/MHz number is really only useful within a certain generation of processors.

This is why even a single core of the C2D will make short work of some processors with much higher GHz ratings.

As mentioned before, two cores do not equal double the processing performance as frankly most software does not have the coding to take advantage of it...
However, most of today's OS's can at least separate out OS-level requests with program-level requests.