Question Can anyone clearly explain powe difference between i5,7, and 9

[sloan1209]

To explain my situation, I recently got a 3090 TI and tried to play cyberpunk to test it out. It gets about 88 frames in open areas on max graphics but In crowded cities it's still about 30 fps and stuttery. I turn graphics to minimum and still no change in fps. I have an i59600k @4.6Mhz. My mobo only takes 8th and 9th generation cpu so was wondering if getting something like an i9 9900k would make all the difference. Trying to save effort and money not having to replace too much.

I've tried to do stuff up on this but they don't seem to be too clear or they frame it in terms that I'm not familiar with so I don't really know if it'd make that much of a difference or I should just fully replace mobo and cpu.

 

[kerberos_20]

cyberpunk is rather CPU heavy, it can utilize up to 8 cores...lots of games are already running on 8 cores btw, which is mostly fine on CPUs with hyperthreading, which your CPU lacks
if you plan to upgrade onl CPU, then id go with 8700K, it offers roughly similar performance in games compared to 9900K while its much cheaper

but on the other hand 12700k gives tons of performance uplift at same price point as "new" 8700K...just different mainboard needed

 

[hotaru.hino]

The thing with application performance and CPUs depends entirely on how many threads the application spawns, what those threads are responsible for, and how often those threads can run. A thread is basically a task the application has to run, so if we take a web browser for instance, you can have a thread for the GUI, a thread for handling network connections, and a thread for running JavaScript code. A thread is what the OS schedules to run on the CPU.

With regards to games, a game won't render graphics until it's done with everything else about the game, such as player input handling, AI, and physics. Another thing is these steps tend to happen in a specific order. So it doesn't matter how many threads the game spawns; the game can't run them all at once. And lastly, there's the issue of how many threads are working on getting the render commands compiled to send off to the GPU. DX11 and OpenGL had a flaw where everything was done on one thread, so it didn't matter if you had a 4-core or a 16-core CPU in the same family. DX12 and Vulkan fixed this, but it doesn't exactly mean that this part of the game will use all the cores.

In your situation, the only thing that would help improve performance may be a combination of more cores (or a higher thread count) plus higher clock speeds. But most games don't see improvement past a 6C/12T processor.

 

[Nighthawk117]

To explain my situation, I recently got a 3090 TI and tried to play cyberpunk to test it out. It gets about 88 frames in open areas on max graphics but In crowded cities it's still about 30 fps and stuttery. I turn graphics to minimum and still no change in fps. I have an i59600k @4.6Mhz. My mobo only takes 8th and 9th generation cpu so was wondering if getting something like an i9 9900k would make all the difference. Trying to save effort and money not having to replace too much.

I've tried to do stuff up on this but they don't seem to be too clear or they frame it in terms that I'm not familiar with so I don't really know if it'd make that much of a difference or I should just fully replace mobo and cpu.

Having played Cyberpunk 2077 in lots of CPU configurations a 9900K would be substantial improvement over what you have. You can reduce the load on your current CPU by setting crowd density to low, however if you want to run with Ray Tracing enabled then you will need something faster. Bare in mind for a 9900K you will need a board with strong power delivery and a high end cooler.

To be honest, you have a 3090 Ti, your best bet really would be to get a 12700K, a 9900K would solve your problem with your frame rate collapsing in crowded areas but there are times when Cyberpunk will still max it out.