Question How resilient is an i5 4690 fot gaming.

Bazzlebrush88

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As the title asks - but I will elaborate; my CPU (i5 4690) is doing great for gaming for me. How future proof is this? Do you see this processor handling many more future games, or am i going to be forced to upgrade by next year? Should this see me well for a good couple of years yet?

I am poor!
 

Lutfij

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What sort of games are you looking to play/tax the system with? You're mileage will vary as the titles from EA, such as Battlefield 5 and SW tax the CPU a great deal, which will be higher as you see more games released. You could play at reduced resolution and in-game details.
 
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Bazzlebrush88

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What sort of games are you looking to play/tax the system with? You're mileage will vary as the titles from EA, such as Battlefield 5 and SW tax the CPU a great deal, which will be higher as you see more games released. You could play at reduced resolution and in-game details.

Thanks for the reply!

I have battlefield 5, plays at max at around 36 fps. 1920x1080p resolution.

I almost cried when I went to play farcry new dawn and it was about 22fps - bearing in mind farcry 5 I could play at max without a stutter at the same resolution at around 47fps average.

What has changed between farcry 5 and new dawn to create such a performance drop off tge same system? What should I reduce to keep the detail and fps high like farcry 5 ?

Should i just reduce resolution scale you think? Will that free up the CPU usage?

Brain tickler! So many settings, so difficult to know what affects CPU and what affects GPU and what uses a combo of both .
 
Thanks for the reply!

I have battlefield 5, plays at max at around 36 fps. 1920x1080p resolution.

I almost cried when I went to play farcry new dawn and it was about 22fps - bearing in mind farcry 5 I could play at max without a stutter at the same resolution at around 47fps average.

What has changed between farcry 5 and new dawn to create such a performance drop off tge same system? What should I reduce to keep the detail and fps high like farcry 5 ?

Should i just reduce resolution scale you think? Will that free up the CPU usage?

Brain tickler! So many settings, so difficult to know what affects CPU and what affects GPU and what uses a combo of both .
It more look like GPU is what holding you back. Anyway to get some FPS you could try lower some graphic settings and turn off V-Sync. But reducing the resolution will make it horrible. if you playing on 1080p screen i suggest these setting will do some extra FPS but it better to look forward for a new GPU if you can. And for the CPU i think it's more than enough for today and it will be the same for next two years as well. You haven't mentioned about the GPU?


Most games we have today will not use more than 4 cores but there are some games take advatage of having more cores especially like CSGO but it's not big deal 4C will be enough.
 
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"580 2048sp"
So basically a very slightly factory overclocked 570 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-radeon-rx-580-2048sp,37933.html

Games like Battlefield 5 will struggle on a 4 core, so for those games, a 4 core I5 is not future proof at all.
Open world games like GTAV and Far cry are going to perform much better on a 6 core 12 thread cpu.

Although I am currently running GTAv on an AMD 4t cpu and a slightly faster GPU with 60-80fps, I am severely cpu bound.
 
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I agree with remixislandmusic in that for newer games, the reason you get lower FPS is probably your CPU. Even the cut down version of the RX-580 should be able to do quite well in 1080p medium settings games, but the haswell quad-core is starting to show its age, especially with newer games taking advantage of more cores. Take a look at this video comparing the r5-1600 vs the i5-7600k :
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97sDKvMHd8c&t=42s


Even though the i5 is a newer, higher clocked, higher IPC quad-core, in newer games, the r5 with more cores and threads can beat or match it. So in your case with an older, non-overclockable i5, I would look at perhaps investing in the up and coming Ryzen 3000 series thats coming out soon with a good well rounded number of cores, good IPC, and good clock speed.
 

Bazzlebrush88

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I think I'm gonna have to save my pennies and buy a new CPU.

I think these games companies have a pact going with Intel/amd - to ensure that more processing power is needed in
Gaming to comply with newer versions of CPU releases. Just pushing consumers to upgrade.

What I hate is the thought I could buy a ryzen, upgrade... Just for a new load of cpus to come out as soon as I've caught up putting me in the situation I'm in now.

The rig I had before, was pitiful. This was an upgrade for me! But it seems I caught up when the gaming industry has begun to make huge leaps, requiring more processing and GPU power..

Cry
 

GrandSACHI

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Bazzlebrush88

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Why would you buy a 5-year-old CPU anymore? Current Intel CPUs are 8xxx and 9xxx not 4xxx
I'd return it.

The Ryzen 3 1200 performs similarly and likely cost a ton less than an old stock CPU. They haven't made 4th gen CPUs for years.
I know it doesn't make much sense why I'd
buy a 4 year old cpu but am a single parent working on a strict budget, literally managed to get an acer predator case with the original LGA 1150 motherboard /psu for like 15 GBP, so the i5 4690 was best option for that .
 
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Karadjgne

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Cpu pre-renders the game code. It'll pre-render those frames as much and as fast as it can. But thats the limit. It ships those frames to the gpu, which finish renders the frames into a picture and sticks it on screen, according to resolution and detail settings. So resolution and detail settings have very little to no affect on fps, coming from the cpu, only affecting gpu output.

With a strong gpu, it'll take everything the cpu can give it and stick it all on screen, regardless of details. With a weak gpu, it'll only render what it can, changing detail settings lowering or increasing fps onscreen, up to the limit of whatever the cpu gives it.

Fps from the cpu is basically dependent on 1 thing. The game code. Games like BF5, Gta:V, Witcher 3, SWBF2 etc are optimized for 8 thread usage. Trying to cram all that into 4 threads is gonna create serious backlogs and prioritizing, which hits fps in the...

Heavily detailed, high physX usage games, massive polygon counts etc all take a hit on the gpu, which is trying to render them. Lowering details alleviates some of that uber fine detailing.

If going from ultra to low changes fps greatly, you have a gpu shortage in power. If it doesn't change much at all, then the fps limit is low, all cpu.

There's only one cure for low cpu fps output, stronger cpu with thread count/IPC to handle the game. If dumping detail settings isn't something you can live with, the only cure is a stronger gpu.

For the Critics: you assume much. In the Indo-Asiatic markets the best selling cpus are 3rd and 4th gen, lga1155/0 is still very much prevalent as 8th and 9th gen Intel is off the charts expensive. So ppl are making do with what they can get.

Even in the States, a used Dell pushing a 4770 is only @ $250-$300 for the whole pc. That doesn't get you anything but a 9400f and the cheapest mobo.

Some ppl are limited by location, budget, availability. Not everyone has options to get 8th or 9th gen Intel. I can't even afford to upgrade my 3770k/970 and I make decent money. Kids come first, along with bills and the mortgage.

So don't judge.

Edit :
At the time of writing, the Radeon RX 580 2048SP hasn't made its way to the Western Hemisphere yet.

Indo-Asiatic market.
 
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I don't know what the pricing is on 4th gen Intel processors where you live, but maybe you can get an i7-4790 or i7-4770 cheap as an upgrade. That's really the only processor that is any better than what you have now without requiring a completely overhaul of your system. I have an i7-4790k, but I am GPU limited (old GTX-770) right now so I don't actually hit 100% usage on it when I game. If you upgrade to i7-4790/4770, I think it'll actually be a good match to your rx-580(2048SP) since having that extra hyper-threading is gonna help with newer games.

I'm sure you've already read this a bunch but I don't think that upgrading the graphics card is gonna increase your FPS much if you stick with the i5-4690 simply because the processor is starting to become the bottleneck in your situation.
 

Karadjgne

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You should never hit 100% usage on a cpu or gpu, ram or hdd. All that equipment always works at 100% ability, the usage is misleading because that's just a tally of the resources used to get that.

For instance CSGO. It's a 2 thread game. That's all the game code requires and demands at any given point. So it's entirely possible on a weak cpu to see 2x cores close to 100%, but the other 2x cores are doing nothing but run windows stuff, monitoring software, background stuff etc. So 2x 100 + 30 +30 = 260, /4 = 62% usage. On a very weak cpu you might actually see both those cores hit 100% usage, and now the cpu is bottlenecked, because the game makes no effort or has no ability in the code to accept a 3rd core.

Gpus are no different.