do CPUs significantly affect FPS?

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anaheim

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Apr 12, 2015
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i was looking at these benchmark results (http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/1107) having a preconcieved thought that CPUs affect FPS drastically, however the difference between a ~$70 CPU and a ~$350 is <10 FPS... I'm aware that the price difference is justified through editing and stuff, but I thought they had a much larger impact on gaming, do these benchmarks seem correct?
 
Solution
jaguarskx


According to the CPU benchmarks below, a Core i3 CPU is competitive with AMD's 6 and 8 core CPUs.

http://www.techspot.com/review/991-gta-5-pc-benchmarks/page6.html
CPU_01.png


http://pclab.pl/art57777-24.html
gtav_vhigh_cpu.png


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Additionally, due to the lower...
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To a certain extent, yes. But also it depends on how well a game is optimized for PC. But having said that, we already have games take advantage of better CPUs married with decent GPUs like BF4, Crysis 3, Metro 2033, Modded Skyrim, Arma 3 etc. Also in near future like games like The Witcher 3, Star Citizen etc.

Still that 10 FPS is huge. And every single FPS is critical, especially when you have a low-mid range PC and try to record your game play with game play video capture softwares like FRAPS (usually gobbles more than 5 FPS), Shadowplay (Gobbles 5 FPS in GTA V - GTA 5 / V - i3 4150 - 4GB RAM - GTX 750 ti - 1080p - 720p. But this guy still with this config, gets Average 35 FPS with Shadowplay on, reflects how well GTA V PC is optimized).

Considering the recent debacle of Ubisoft's FarCry 4 failing to launch on Dual Cores, future appears safe to those who have at least a quad core processor, IMO :)

At the end of the day, It's all comes down to Price-Performance Ratio. The following CPUs will come under that category:

Intel:
If you're on a budget, get i5 4460 (Quad(4) Core)
If you're looking for a high-end overclock CPU, get i5 4690K (Quad(4) Core)

AMD:
If you're on a budget get this overclock CPU FX 6300.(Hexa(6) Core)
If you're looking for a high-end overclock CPU, get FX 8350. (Octa(8) Core)

Cheers!
 
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I do agree with yeskay, every fps counts: but even if you are not recording (very few people do). Technically anything under ~46 fps is straining on anyone watching or playing the game (not going to get into the medical/biology mumbo jumbo). For the foreseeable future a 4+ core processor will be necessary for gaming especially after GTA V came out. However while the processor will be a significant contributor to your FPS any modern processor, even i3's considered, will do a decent job of keeping up. Your biggest factor in your FPS will be your graphics card / video card, its essentially a mini super charged computer itself which is in charge of the bulk of your gaming unless you are running an integrated APU (different story at that point).

For example my friend just built a budget gaming PC for around $300 and the processor is a Pentium anniversary edition which he got $20 brand new, he can get a solid 60fps on almost any game he plays with his gtx 660 graphics card.
 
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Not nearly as much as the Graphics card, but you should always consider getting a decent CPU which can well pair with your Graphics card.. For example dont buy a gtx 980 with an average i3 processor, it will bottleneck everything including the power of your graphics card! I personally have an i7 3770k and i'm mostly gaming which isn't that necessary for a good CPU!
 
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More specifically, it affects mostly the AI and generally programming in games, and how efficiently the GPU works with the motherboard. Modern CPU's control the activity of PCIE lanes and determine when the system responds to them, more powerful CPUs give devices less downtime (this is in nano seconds usually) and so they send and receive information faster giving off a few more frames per second. Also to note, the AI and programming of the game keeps up and you experience less bugs and more responsive gameplay.
 
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Depends on the game; something like GTA V is going to be much more sensitive to the CPU, then say, any FPS would. But no matter what, there's a point where the GPU matters more, and performance flatlines as you increase CPU power. These days, that flatline occurs somewhere between FX-8xxx/i3 and i5 level CPUs.
 
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I noticed that my CPU usage during gta v was more than my ram's.. This means it uses a lot of CPU during gameplay and a good CPU DOES matter for GTA V but not many other games!
 
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Some games can really see an FPS increase from using a better CPU over a less powerful CPU. Other games don't really need much CPU power and mostly benefit from the Graphics Card. (Graphics cards are usually the priority part to put above anything else in a gaming pc) You still want to try to balance a decent CPU with a decent Graphics card if you can.. I've seen some games benefit as little as a few frames from an adequate but very average performing cpu over a high end one.. However, some games can see their frame rates literally double from one CPU to a higher performing one.. Sometimes you'll see a pc with a better graphics card by out-performed FPS-wise by a less graphics card that was paired with a much better CPU (for example an r9 290x with a fx 6300 will probably get outshined by a plain r9 290 if it is paired with an i7 4790k in a wide variety of games) However the difference in performance between CPU's typically have to be a bigger gap than the gap between the Graphics graphics cards to pull this off. (An i7 4790k with a gtx 560 ti will get outshined by an fx 8350 with a gtx 770 as the 770 is too far ahead of the 560 ti for the CPU's difference to be any significant factor in this scenario)
 
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A CPU intensive game will definitely affect your fps significantly.Most games, cpu intensive or not, rely more on the GPU.Another thing to keep in mind though is that not all games are able to utilize a cpu equally to its limits.Most games today will utilize 2-4 cores but any more than that (the extreme editions) and you wouldn't see a lot of improvement(usually about 5-10%) and hence why extremes are so rare.An i7 920 in one game will provide better fps than an fx 6300, and vice versa
 
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According to the CPU benchmarks below, a Core i3 CPU is competitive with AMD's 6 and 8 core CPUs.

http://www.techspot.com/review/991-gta-5-pc-benchmarks/page6.html
CPU_01.png


http://pclab.pl/art57777-24.html
gtav_vhigh_cpu.png


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Additionally, due to the lower processing power of AMD CPU compared to Intel CPUs, they benefit more from overclocking

http://www.techspot.com/review/991-gta-5-pc-benchmarks/page6.html
CPU_02.png

CPU_03.png
 
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Solution
Well first it depends on the GPU and then the game/program you're running. If the game/program is optimized to use the CPU more than GPU then the CPU becomes very important. If you have a bad GPU then the CPU will also help to get a few fps. As the charts/graphs above show, the CPU doesn't make too much of a difference, it also depends on the clock speed and voltage of the CPU. Most games will mainly use the GPU and so if you have a really good GPU you can afford to have a not so good CPU.
 
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ubisoft was paid to put in code that freaked on dual core cpus it was patched later a few games did this
 
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"According to the CPU benchmarks below, a Core i3 CPU is competitive with AMD's 6 and 8 core CPUs."

i3 chips have worse minimum frame rates than i5 and i7 chips in some games. Two real cores can be a liability.
 
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depends what games you are playing. some games have super bad graphics and are cpu intensive like minecraft ect, while others need a good gpu. remember to get a balanced pair of cpu and gpu or your pc will be bottlenecked. also a better cpu will mean that your pc will last a lot longer before needing to have cash paid to upgrade it; I would recommend i5's personally for cheaper gaming systems. an R9 380 runs just fine with it, but go for NVidia if you have the extra $$. I myself got an i7 4790k(will overclock), 16gb ram(will never use more than that + an upgrade to 32gb if needed), and an R9 380.
 
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OP, you're looking at singleplayer benchmarks. Large player/unit multiplayer games are MUCH more compute intensive. The difference between my old overclocked FX-6300 and stock i7 4770k in BF4 64-player games for instance, was about 30-40 fps (with all other components and settings the same). Now look at a singleplayer benchmark in BF4 and the difference may be ~5 fps. What games and conditions you're playing in makes an enormous difference.

So yes, in compute intensive real-time tasks like large scale multiplayer gaming, CPU's significantly affect framerates. If all you're doing is playing singleplayer campaign modes, then not really.
 
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CPU power matters only so far as to keep the GPU fed. Once the CPU is going fast enough where the GPU is the limiting factor, farther increases to CPU power give littler performance gain.

Take these two charts:

CPU_02.png


Shows that CPU performance tops out around 83-84 FPS or so; farther increases the CPU performance gain nothing, because you are 100% bottlenecked by the GPU at that point.

Now look at AMD:

CPU_03.png


Still 10 FPS slower then Intel clocked at 4GHz. That's where CPU power matters, and why most of us here consider AMDs BD architecture a failure.
 
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