Are dual cores truely dead for gaming?

[TwilightRavens]

I want to know everyone's opinion on this one, I think it'd be an interesting discussion.

Anyway does anyone think Dual Core rigs are pretty much dead in the water for mid-range/semi-high end gaming rig seeing as things are moving towards "gimmie moar cores!" if so please explain why you think so.

For example: I think its a yes or no, I mean pairing an i3 with a 1080 ti is pretty stupid idea seeing as the i3 just wouldn't have enough "power" (I use that term very loosely) so to say to keep the 1080 ti fed at 1080p. But seeing as 4k and even 8k gaming is becoming more common. In theory since at higher resolution the gpu is used more wouldn't an i3 or a hyperthreaded pentium be enough to feed it? I mean obviously not compared to a 6 or 8+ core cpu but wouldn't it get you better performance vs say an i3 with like a lower end gpu that it won't bottleneck it at 1080p? Or would it basically be a linear scale? I assuming if there was a gpu out there that in theory could handle 8k gaming fine.

 

[InvalidError]

but "not enough" and "not enough for me" are completely different things.

On enthusiast sites, it is extremely difficult to convince the top-1% that 99% of games can work acceptably on far less than an i7-7700k overclocked to 5GHz.

 

[4745454b]

So you believe that changing the settings will somehow make the game use more threads?Less threads?What is it you think will happen if the settings change?

Yes, because you showed a Pentium and 1050TI (?) hitting 60FPS+. If the settings were all relaxed/low then that explains how you got the scores. As someone mentioned above, he plays a game on his C2D 8200, but I fully expect that's not at 1080 with all the details up. Go max out the settings and see what happens to your frame rates. Seeing as you have a card similar to the recommended setup I expect you to be able to turn on most of them, but any of the settings that stress the CPU will lower those frame rates.

"not enough" and "not enough for me" are completely different things...On enthusiast sites, it is extremely difficult to convince the top-1% that 99% of games can work acceptably on far less than an i7-7700k overclocked to 5GHz.

I realize this to two different people, but seeing as it's the same subject I'll post this reply together. It's not that you need the highest end hardware clocked to the wall. I'm still using my 3770K and R9 280. For what I use my PC for this setup works well. I might end up getting a game that will require an upgrade, but at this point in time I'm ok with my setup. That said, if I were building a new PC I wouldn't be shooting for "just enough for me", or even "just enough". The question that was asked is are dual cores truly dead. I would argue any true dual core, and probably most 2C/4T CPUs at this point in time shouldn't be bought for anyone building a "serious" gaming PC. Just a few months ago I/we were still suggesting Pentiums at the low end. But that was before Ryzen and the soon to be released Coffee lake. With the suggested hardware for new games, 2C and 2C/4T CPUs aren't going to provide you with 60FPS at 1080 with details "maxed". If YOU want to run at 720 or details turned off then go for it. But as an enthusiast site we suggest what's needed to make the games run, run well, and run pretty. I think a better question to ask is "is 1080 dead?" Because many people seem to be moving on from that.

 

[InvalidError]

With the suggested hardware for new games, 2C and 2C/4T CPUs aren't going to provide you with 60FPS at 1080 with details "maxed". If YOU want to run at 720 or details turned off then go for it. But as an enthusiast site we suggest what's needed to make the games run, run well, and run pretty.

And most games still run plenty well and 'pretty' on substantially slower/older hardware with details knocked down a notch or two. Looking at image quality comparisons between medium, high and ultra in a handful of newer games, enthusiasts who insist on playing with everything maxed out are deep into diminishing returns.

 

[4745454b]

About the only time I agree is with AA. Back in my day 320x240 was a res people played at. Or more common 640x480. At this res AA is a requirement, and lots of it. There really isn't a need for 8x AA when playing at 1920x1080. I usually throw 2x AA on just for a little smoothing. At that res 8x AA is just a frame killer. While I agree that not all games show a good improvement between high and ultra, I personally wouldn't want to run a game with details not at their best.

 

[Karadjgne]

Depends Alot on the game engine. I occasionally will spend a few hours in Neverwinter. It's not exactly huge on details or any kind of softness, it's an older engine and really doesn't push any boundaries on a 3570k or 660ti. But, there's a marked difference in AA settings. The difference between 8xAA and 16xAA is huge. But initially, that game wasn't designed for the level of details, softness, roundness etc moving objects were still regulated to a bunch of triangular edges. Today's graphics are so highly photo-realistic, the need for AA to smooth out angularity is about moot.

I just see it as a user preference. The dual core cpus are capable, especially with HT, of running the games, most of them, with the caveat that the user will not be able to max out many settings. Or even run with many options such as physX. With the prices of newer games being what they are, paying a lot of cash to play, and not getting the full affect of what you pay for, isn't much fun. I personally don't relish the idea of paying $60+ for a game that's going to look and play worse on a pc than it does on a console.

 

[InvalidError]

I personally don't relish the idea of paying $60+ for a game that's going to look and play worse on a pc than it does on a console.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have people like me who play games on PC because most of the same games enthusiasts and console gamers pay $60+ for eventually end up as GOTY/Complete/whatever editions on Steam and other platforms for $10-20 instead of $60-200 after all the DLCs, season passes and other extra costs that plague far too many modern titles.

 

[TwilightRavens]

I personally don't relish the idea of paying $60+ for a game that's going to look and play worse on a pc than it does on a console.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have people like me who play games on PC because most of the same games enthusiasts and console gamers pay $60+ for eventually end up as GOTY/Complete/whatever editions on Steam and other platforms for $10-20 instead of $60-200 after all the DLCs, season passes and other extra costs that plague far too many modern titles.

Yeah you gotta love when steam has sales like those. The absolute best time to just grab every game that you have been wanting for a while for dirt cheap.

 

[TerryLaze]

Yes, because you showed a Pentium and 1050TI (?) hitting 60FPS+. If the settings were all relaxed/low then that explains how you got the scores. As someone mentioned above, he plays a game on his C2D 8200, but I fully expect that's not at 1080 with all the details up. Go max out the settings and see what happens to your frame rates. Seeing as you have a card similar to the recommended setup I expect you to be able to turn on most of them, but any of the settings that stress the CPU will lower those frame rates.

Look at the pics again on the left side there is gpu-z running, Gpu usage in dx11 is 97% and in dx12 it's 99%,raising res and quality will just make the cpu work LESS because the GPU wouldn't be able to keep up.
And for the nth time,no matter how many FPS you will or will not get, dx12 runs less threads leaving more CPU resources for the game threads.
If you play at settings where the GPU can't match your CPUs framerate in the first place then it's all moot,the only thing you might notice will be reduced CPU usage,wich in itself would give the system more leaveway for background tasks.

 

[TerryLaze]

But that was before Ryzen and the soon to be released Coffee lake. With the suggested hardware for new games, 2C and 2C/4T CPUs aren't going to provide you with 60FPS at 1080 with details "maxed". If YOU want to run at 720 or details turned off then go for it. But as an enthusiast site we suggest what's needed to make the games run, run well, and run pretty. I think a better question to ask is "is 1080 dead?" Because many people seem to be moving on from that.

Just like the ryzens the duals are much closer to the top dogs in 4k.
People have to manage to wrap their brains around the fact that all the games are deved for the consoles,they don't have effects that use the CPU because the console CPU just isn't able to handle it,why do people think that GPU compute has become such a big thing lately?
[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDG-dQsHymE"][/video]

 

[4745454b]

In reference to that video above, I can link plenty of results from many different sites that will claim otherwise. Just because some guy youtube claims something in a whole THREE games doesn't make it so. I would argue he either hand picked games that showed what he wanted, or because the chips perform so close he has a bottleneck somewhere else that is limiting him. (Yes, possibly 4K.) Getting better CPUs for gaming isn't "marketing" like he claimed in the video.

 

[TerryLaze]

In reference to that video above, I can link plenty of results from many different sites that will claim otherwise. Just because some guy youtube claims something in a whole THREE games doesn't make it so. I would argue he either hand picked games that showed what he wanted, or because the chips perform so close he has a bottleneck somewhere else that is limiting him. (Yes, possibly 4K.) Getting better CPUs for gaming isn't "marketing" like he claimed in the video.

Of course that's the bottleneck,that's the whole point,I responded to
"If YOU want to run at 720 or details turned off then go for it. "
and
" I think a better question to ask is "is 1080 dead?" Because many people seem to be moving on from that."
If your GPU isn't fast enough to show any difference then the CPU is irrelevant,you might get a bit higher minimums but that's it.

 

[InvalidError]

In reference to that video above, I can link plenty of results from many different sites that will claim otherwise.

There are plenty more techtubers, many of which with far more extensive game lineups, who come to the same conclusion: the G4560 is still perfectly adequate to drive GPUs at least up to the GTX1060 in most current games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUapuF0y30s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL7YcPlJ83c

 

[4745454b]

Seeing as youtube links are now gospel...

https://youtu.be/ha2Dbu_EBT0?t=47

Pegged 100% CPU load, ~60% GPU load. But you only need a dual core right?

https://youtu.be/ha2Dbu_EBT0?t=120

Same video, different game. Similar result. CPU pegged at 100%, GPU bouncing at 80s%. At 2:05 the GPU load even goes down to ~60%. But of course you only need a dual core to game at 4k.

 

[InvalidError]

Seeing as youtube links are now gospel...

Show me one major tech website which has bothered benchmarking the G4560 beyond "matched" graphics or shoot for completely unrealistic targets for the budget. None of those I know of have bothered doing so, which heaves "youtube gospel" as one of very few sources of such information.

Pointing out that CPU cores/threads are 'pegged' to 100% is kind of pointless when it happens mainly in games that are considered bad ports. I'd be curious to see a profiler trace of those games showing where they actually spend most of that time. I wouldn't be surprised if they were busy-waiting much of that time instead of doing actually useful work.

 

[TerryLaze]

Same video, different game. Similar result. CPU pegged at 100%, GPU bouncing at 80s%. At 2:05 the GPU load even goes down to ~60%. But of course you only need a dual core to game at 4k.

Over 40FPS,50 to 60FPS most of the time and those are like the most CPU demanding titles that you could find,now 40FPS in demanding scenes might not be enough for you but it certainly doesn't mean that duals are dead for gaming,they are just weak for gaming(weaker then others) but that's a given anyway.
They still provide a better gaming experience then current gen consoles and those are certainly not considered to be dead for gaming...

 

[4745454b]

Pointing out that CPU cores/threads are 'pegged' to 100% is kind of pointless when it happens mainly in games that are considered bad ports...I wouldn't be surprised if they were busy-waiting much of that time instead of doing actually useful work...and those are like the most CPU demanding titles that you could find

Really? Bad ports? They are really spending time waiting? You really believe them being idle waiting for something is increasing the CPU load?

https://hothardware.com/reviews/gta-v-pc-performance-4k-and-3-geforces?page=3

Bad ports don't do well, doesn't matter the hardware. That's what makes them a bad port. If a 980 is similar to a 1060, here is a bigger CPU and two 980s, so a 1080, or 1080TI?, doing just fine with GTA5 at 4k. And as I've said with the 8320 or 8350, it's fine to run most games out there, but I'm not building a system that can handle "most games". I want one that will whatever I throw at it. I don't want to be looking at a game to buy and have to not buy it because my XYZ isn't strong enough.

Shifting the load massively onto the GPU doesn't make a low end CPU great either. Because once GPUs catch up to the new res the weakness of that CPU is going to be seen again. Not just in some games, but it will be like 1080 results are right now. Again, I can't tell people to buy something that won't perform well in all possible cases. It's not something I can do.

 

[InvalidError]

Really? Bad ports? They are really spending time waiting? You really believe them being idle waiting for something is increasing the CPU load?

Read up on what "busy waiting" (a.k.a. 'spinning') means. Busy-waiting (or spinning) is the process of continuously polling a variable. It is frequently used as an alternative to using mutexes, semaphores, signals and other inter-process synchronization objects to avoid the overhead associated with passing control back to the OS, especially for locks that should be short-lived, at the expense of wasting CPU cycles and power.

// global space
volatile int some_variable;

//busy wait until "some_variable" is set to zero by some other thread
while (some_variable);
// continue with useful code here

Yes, busy-waiting does cause 100% load while doing nothing useful. It shouldn't take much imagination from there to see how a console game which may have been designed with 4-6 busy-wait threads for a slow-ass 8-core console SoC becoming problematic on a technically much faster quad-threaded desktop CPU.

 

[Karadjgne]

To answer an earlier post, that was actually written in English.... It's hard to really wait long for Steam to put on those sales. Take the original GuildWars. Right in the middle of the story line was a couple of missions that absolutely required multiple ppl in a group to accomplish. By the time the price dropped and you got all 4 of the DLC's, many had moved on to GuildWars 2. Getting a group for those 2 missions was a royal pain. Underworld could be done solo if you had the exact right built monk and Nec, otherwise it took a group. Right now I'm playing Swtor and I'm getting stuck at Operations because the numbers of actual online users wanting to do that particular Op is dismal at best. Sure, it's fine for skyrim, or even Kotor2, both solo games, but anything @3yrs or older that requires multiple online users is a toss up. Wait till the new CS drops, and you'll be in a 2x2 game with 0 wait time and great lag cuz the chances of a 10x10 drop will be gone and servers will be empty.
So, do you spend the $60 for the game when everyone else is also online, or wait a few years and get it for $20 when there's few ppl around.

 

[carssuckjeepsrule]

Yes, your dual core is dead. Go immediately and order a Ryzen or Cannon Lake. Kidding.

No, dual cores aren't dead. The current i3s do just fine in casual gaming. Super hard core gaming 4K on 16 monitors at 168 FPS 24/7? No. But a lot of things run more than just 'ok' on a speedy little i3 and mid level video card and will continue to do so for a while. All games are not created equal so YMMV, but a Haswell i3 with a 750ti or 1050 ti is not going to be obsolete tomorrow. However, it's certainly not enough for the guys rocking 1080tis.

Please take my opinion (all opinions!) with a grain of salt and weigh your gaming wants and needs against actual benchmark data. Here is some food for thought on all those cores and threads and what you actually get:
https://techbuyersguru.com/best-gaming-cpus-pentium-vs-core-i3-vs-core-i5-vs-core-i7

So, are dual cores dead? No. Middle aged and looking toward retirement? Yep, but good to go for quite a while yet.

 

[Karadjgne]

Well to be fair, kinda depends on your opinion of what constitutes a dual core. With HT enabled, a dual core i3 is still pushing 4 threads, and is mostly just as capable, if not more so than some i5's. Like a i3-6100 vrs an i5-6400. The i3+HT wins in every category below 4 thread @80% usage. Could even put that i3 up against some older cpus like a 4460 and come out decent. But thats 4 threads vrs 4 threads. That same i5-6400 up against an older c2d with its 2c/2t or any of the older pentium cpus, well that's a joke.
So retire the c2d's, they are done for gaming, but 4t duals will still be around a while.

 

[InvalidError]

Well to be fair, kinda depends on your opinion of what constitutes a dual core.

I think the distinction between cores and threads is quite clear. I don't remember there being much confusion about the Northwood P4 being a single-core dual-threaded CPU that provided ~30% more performance than its non-HT counterparts at next to no extra die area cost, unlike extra cores which add ~100% more potential performance and ~100% core die area. Newer CPU cores have wider execution units and are able to achieve performance gains up to 40% from SMT, still nowhere close to what can be achieved with extra cores but nice to have for nearly free.

Plain dual-cores are dead, which is why Intel's newest Pentiums are SMT/HT-enabled and have effectively obsolesced pre-Coffee Lake i3 which will themselves be displacing pre-Coffee Lake i5.

So retire the c2d's, they are done for gaming, but 4t duals will still be around a while.

The Core 2 Quad are two dual-core dies on a single package, which makes then 4C4T. Gaming-wise, the Core 2 architecture is way behind modern CPUs on single-threaded performance and is passable at best in many current games.

 

[carssuckjeepsrule]

Well to be fair, kinda depends on your opinion of what constitutes a dual core.

Not really, it's still a dual core, but with benefits. An i3 with 4 threads is about equivalent to a triple core processor. The threads are nice but they don't equal a true processor. If they did, why would there be an i5? And the lowly dual core Pentiums, especially the 3258 which can overclock like a champ, are still very playable depending on your expectations and games. The original question mentions "mid-range/semi-high end" gaming which requires a clear definition before anyone can say what is enough performance. Is CSGO mid range? Is Dota? They're not hardware hogs and a speedy dual core with a decent GPU makes them very playable. Also, the previous link is a little misleading since history has revealed you don't need the expensive h97 or z97 to overclock the budget Pentium. The i3 is still a better budget choice though but now the Pentiums are getting extra threads too. I personally feel the i5 is the sweet spot, but the little Pentiums and i3s aren't dead yet, assuming expectations are realistic.

 

[jaguarskx]

Dual core CPUs are still fine for playing games. Not all games require or even use more than 2 cores. Even games that can take advantage of 4 cores a dual core CPU can still manage decently well.... unless it is one of AMD pre-Ryzen generation APUs.

It depends how casual / hardcore the person is. Hardcore gamer? Just get a quad core. Casual player with a PC that has a dual core i3 CPU? You'll be okay.