Why is everyone so worried about processors?

I am curious about this, because other than games like Crysis(Which demands power exclusively from the processor), it's the GPU that really matters. I mean, you really won't see as much of a difference in gaming between a 2.0 ghz and a 2.4 ghz as there is between 8600GT and a 8800 GTX. I know having a fast processor is nice to have for gaming, but I believe (for hard core gamers) Money should be more focused on GPU than CPU. That's just my opinnion, I'm not trying to troll. I'm just curious as to what people think.

 

Thats what most people know on here as ive seen.

 

People aren't looking to gain performance, they're looking to prevent bottlenecks. Not all games are equal - some depend on the processor greatly, others demand very little from the processor. Either way, it will improve performance in a game, as many effects and physics are done on the CPU. Not to mention, many other factors come in to account, not just the processor speed.

You're right - I'd rather have the 2.0 and the 8800GTX than the 2.4 with the 8600GT - but at the same time, I would probably bump up my CPU to the 2.4 if buying an 8800GTX... otherwise, I may never get all the power the 8800 can give me! That's why the Gateway 6811FX is a good deal, but you NEED to upgrade the CPU. It's got an 8800GTS but a really lame CPU that bottlenecks the GPU pretty badly.

Now, to clear your post... Crysis does not demand power exclusively from the CPU - I have no idea where you got this information. It's very intensive on BOTH the CPU and the GPU.

 

The only problem is, on most laptops, the best you can do is replace the processor instead of the GPU. Most people can't afford to actually replace their notebook, and after maximising RAM, the CPU is the only thing remaining to upgrade. Notebook GPUs are also way more expensive than replacing the processor. There's also the option of OCing for higher clocks.

If it were a desktop though, GPU would definitely be upgraded first.

 

Some games are processor heavy, but in general they do rely on the GPU more. The CPU will rarely bottleneck the game(I've yet to be bottlenecked by a single core on my desktop ), but it will surely help to have a more powerful one. The GPU should be considered first when attempting a gaming notebook but the CUP should also be considered.

It's mostly marketing though. Laptop sellers advertise CPUs far more than GPUs on their adds so the consumer is brought to think that the CPU is that important for everything. Note that even on the CPU, the thing the companies advertise most is either the platform(ex; Centrino 2) or the CPU clock which leads the consumer to believe that the clocks are the main thing.

The same thing can be said for VRAM in the case of a GPU. The VRAM is probably the most emphasized aspect of a GPU(when compared to core clocks or shaders). Often, the average consumer is unaware of the other components of a GPU rather than the VRAM(and the other components are just as if not more important). This marketing trick has made the consumer think that more VRAM is better.

 

>.> I'm pretty sure most people here already know that the cpu doesn't matter nearly as much as the gpu. Laptops like the asus g50vt and gateway fx series have already shown that. The only recent exception to this is GTA IV.

 

Processing power needs vary depending on the person. Money put into a faster hard drive or more RAM are likely to be more worthwhile investments since they will give you more of an everyday performance benefit than a processor upgrade (generally speaking). For many programs, it's the processor waiting on the hard drive or RAM, and not the other way around.

Game performance can be CPU- or GPU-dependent. By dependent, I mean that is the bottleneck. Most games are GPU-dependent, as in, if you were to get a faster GPU you would see a noticeable performance increase. On the contrary, if you were to increase the CPU you wouldn't see much of, if any, difference in performance. Naturally, it's vice-versa for CPU-dependent games.

When evaluating processors, be aware that there is a point of diminishing returns with respect to performance gained vs. dollar increase. For example, look at the following data I made up (and is in no way factual):

Speed - %increase in price from previous processor - %performance increase from previous processor
1.8GHz - N/A - N/A
2.0GHz - 10% - 15%
2.2GHz - 10% - 10%
2.4GHz - 15% - 8%
2.6GHz - 25% - 5%

According to this fictional data, you should stop at the 2.2GHz. Beyond that, you're not getting the same proportional increase in performance from dollars spent.

Realistically speaking, any Core 2 Duo in the 1.8-2.0GHz+ range is going to be fine for modern gaming. A 2.4GHz processor of the same model series is not going to be able to run a game that a 2.0 can't.

 

another important thing to think about is if you play rts games, with 400+ people moving on your screen the processor gets very taxed and generally its the processor slowing you down in those games more than the gpu.

 

But I think P8400 is needed at minium for decent settings. 2.0GHZ is just not enough

 

I haven an 880m GTS. With out the MXM connection and a place to purchase another laptop GPU thats at good as i can get.

But i upgraded my t5550 to an X9000 and the difference running at 3.0gHz makes in my system is night and day.

My preformance went up across the board with the better CPU. So while most games are GPU dependant i still get a pretty decent boost in gaming preformance with the 3gHz my CPU runs now. Plus almost all the games i play are Real Time Strategies so its not abnormal for me to have 100's of gits buzzing around my screen and each one of them needs the CPU to process their logic to tell them what to do.

 

The CPU does play a role in games(especially in RTS games), but it isn't as important as the GPU. If you have a good GPU and an ok CPU, vs an ok GPU and good CPU, the difference will also be night and day.

What people are saying is that other people are sometimes more concerned with CPU than GPU(or at least of the same importance). If you're picking out a machine for gaming, I'd suggest putting your first importance on the GPU and then on the CPU to match the GPU, not the other way around.

Obviously upgrading the CPU does offer some type of performance increase. Games do process data after all...

 

i know for sure my cpu holds me back in tf2/css. i can underclock my gpu and still get same frame rate at stock clocks.

 

I have a 1.83 T5550 and I can run crysis and newer games just fine on medium and high settings. I can run TF2 on high settings at my native res.

 

CPUs are fast enough these days ..

 

I have a single core AMD Athlon 3700+ on my desktop and have yet to be bottle necked by it >.>

CPU does play a role obviously, but in general cases its role is lesser than that of the GPU.

It also depends which CPU and which GPU we're talking about. If the GPU is miles above what you need for the game, while the CPU is at the limit of the requirements, obviously you'll see a performance increase from upgrading the CPU.

 

Well first off, you'd have to fix that comparison. The difference between a 2GHz and 2.4GHz cpu isn't that great to begin with, but the difference between an 8600GT and an 8800GTX is by as much as 3x. In crysis there actually is a pretty significant benefit going from 2GHz to 6GHz.

 

I want a 6gHz CPU... kinda like i want a fire started in my lap

Ah the price of bleeding edge speed

 

Yep, for an RTS heavy gamer like myself, processing power is very important. If your CPU is choking on the amount of units being processed, turning the graphics settings down won't help much. I've seen this happen many times in games like Supreme Commander, CoH, and even Dawn Of War.

On that note, I'm upgrading from 2.4Ghz to the 2.93Hz T9800 in anticipation of Dawn Of War II, not because I'm worried about my 9800GT, but because the new Essence Engine 2.0 has a lot of calculations going on at once.

At lower resolutions, a strong processor can compensate frames for a weaker graphics card. Say a T7500 paired with an 8600gt at 1280x800 and lower.

 

I am not sure it works that way. Either one will bottleneck you if it is inadequate, but they can't really compensate for each other. This is why all those people turning down the resolution in GTA4 to ridiculously low levels aren't getting anywhere -- it's the CPU rather than GPU that's doing the bottlenecking.

I think there is a very good chance that the current trend of games being mostly bottlenecked by the GPU will vanish in the near future and not return in the long term. My reasoning is this: there are very, very few games that demand powerful GPUs being made exclusively for the PC. In fact, with a few exceptions, such games are released on consoles (the 360 and the PS3) first and the PC later. By today's standards, the consoles have reasonably powerful processors (the Cell is still probably not matched by anything short of Core i7). On the other hand, their graphics cards are pretty old and there's only so much you can get out of them even at the relatively low resolution that they're played at.

Thus, if a developer makes a game that fully uses the power of the consoles, they have to make a choice: to release more or less the same game for both or spend a whole lot of time optimizing the PC version for reduced CPU requirements and upping the load on the GPU instead. I would bet that as time goes on, more and more developers will choose the former because it is a good deal cheaper.

In the long term, I think CPUs and GPUs will merge. The graphics card companies are moving towards this with GPGPU and Intel is going the same way from the other direction with Larrabee, so with any luck at all, the days of the discreet GPU are numbered.

 

There is no chance that SLI 8800GTS's are not bottlenecked by a single core Athlon 64 3700+. You may not realize it, but it's a certainty. Upgrade to an FX-60 or FX-62 (depending if you're on S939 or AM2). They're pretty cheap these days and will make the difference night and day for you. As xxErikxx and Kamin_Majere mentioned, this difference is visible even with a Core 2 Duo T5550 and a single laptop 8800GTS. (and just to help my point across, a single laptop 8800GTS is about a third as powerful as a desktop one.)

 

I don't have the 8800 GTS SLI setup actually, just a single one(but it's SLI capable).

I am bottlenecked on newer games probably, but I don't play those a lot anyways.

Obviously upgrading my CPU will boost my performance, because at this point, my CPU is significantly weaker than my GPU, but it does not yield a horrible gaming performance that is my point.

CPU bottleneck means games won't be playable because of the CPU and that is not my case. My limited CPU reduces the quality of my gaming experience yes, but it does not bottleneck it.

Therefore, the CPU, while being important, does not render the experience unplayable either in my case. I've ran DMC4, Crysis(medium settings I think when my friend brought it over), Assassin's Creed and CoD5 without any issues so far.

I doubt the point of the thread is to say "CPU is not important for gaming!!". As with a computer, everything is more or less important since it plays a role. Upgrading will always yield some kind of benefit(otherwise it wouldn't be called so right? ), no matter how small and I doubt anybody is going to argue that. Therefore, there is really no point in saying "I upgraded my CPU and saw a difference in gaming!" because that does kind of define the point of upgrading something.

Anyways, we're going off-topic here.

To answer the initial question, a good CPU is important for gaming, just as any other component of a computer, but in terms of importance it still does fall behind the GPU in most cases.

 

No, that is not what bottleneck means. It is a general term that is not specific to gaming. In any situation where a process relies on or consists of several components or stages or such, the bottleneck is the part which slows everything else down to its own speed or impedes progress. It doesn't necessarily mean that your CPU is making the game unplayable, just that it is slowing it down in such a way that nothing else can compensate for it.

Think it of it in terms of the original analogy from where the usage came: the neck of a bottle can be really, really narrow -- so narrow that you can only pour a drop at a time and it's not practical to do so -- but it can also be of a more reasonable size (like in most bottles) and still impede the flow of the liquid.

 

When it comes down to it, you Computer is as strong as its weakest part.

 

Indeed, in a nutshell that is the case lol . Just that the definition of the importance of the parts may change may depend on what you're doing.

A strong GPU may be useless for Matlab or any application which needs calculations or data processing rather than graphics. In the same way, a Quad Core may not be necessary for games, who are still more dependent on the graphics department(in general cases that is).

Obviously upgrading helps. In my case, I already know that my CPU is probably the weak link of my desktop, but my point isn't that it isn't(I know it is, hence why I want to upgrade the thing sooner or later) the factor which will reduce my gaming performance to void. If I had a really really good CPU and a crappy GPU, then the GPU would turn out to be my bottleneck(and probably the threshold would be faster happening than the CPU).

 

i honestly think in mobile form a core 2 extreme is more then enough power for whatever you do once i do some updates im going either go for a T9800 OR a X9100

 

No, bottleneck means exactly the latter... it means that the CPU reduces the quality of the gaming. Sure, it's possible for you to have such a bottleneck that you can't play the game at all, but here it's just reducing quality.

 

Yeah I got it thanks for clarifying ^_^, although that wasn't my point regardless lol

 

On the other hand though, some of us occasionally play games that are bottlenecked by the CPU, such as RTS games and Source engine games. L4D uses 100% of both cores on my T8300.

 

Yeah thats another thing now that you bring that up some games dont use all 4 cores i think it will take time before all games make the transition i think that will be the time to go quad

 

Not quite. GTA IV's benchmark is utilizing under 55% of my Q6600, so it's not really accurate to say that's why everybody is being bottlenecked. While it is CPU intensive, it comes down to poor coding ultimately.

 

Before we can move forward in gaming and graphics we need to improve what we are at now. As in we need to further optimize our games on the PC platform to take full control of our systems, since most PC games dont do that at all now-adays (by we i mean the game developers).