Slightly Mad Studios designed the Project CARS game engine specifically to promote parallelism by breaking tasks down into smaller chunks across available resources. The end result is a sophisticated engine that scales well with additional CPU cores and higher clock rates.
Then you proceed to show benchmarks in which a 4 core, 4 thread 7600k outperforms an 8 core, 16 thread 6900k and the similarly equipped Ryzen processors. What was the point of adding that line when it's clearly not very accurate, at least beyond 4 cores? Going by these results, the "sophisticated engine" of Project Cars clearly does not scale well with additional CPU cores. Even if we account for the higher clock rates (which should benefit any CPU-limited game, no sophistication required), it's clear that the game isn't making much use of more than 4 threads. Perhaps it scales well up to 4 threads, but that's not particularly useful when we're testing 8 core, 16 thread processors, and it shouldn't be implied that it scales well on these chips.
Rookie_MIB :
If your computer is used for gaming first with some secondary workstation uses, you're better off with Kaby Lake. The almost 5ghz clock speeds rule for gaming where it's not highly optimized for higher thread counts.
One thing to keep in mind though, is that most people tend to keep the same CPU for several years or more. It's likely that games will start to make use of more threads in the coming years, and it's very possible that these 8 core CPUs could start to outperform their higher-clocked, 4 core counterparts in demanding games before long. And of course, none of the games benchmarked here were tested on Ryzen hardware during their development, so they haven't been optimized for the new architecture, and it's likely that we'll see optimizations to better make use of Ryzen processors in upcoming games. Added together, there's a decent chance that a 6 or 8 core Ryzen CPU could have better staying power in the long run than a similarly-priced 4 core Kaby Lake. Nearly all existing games run well enough on any of these processors to perform identically at the refresh rates that most people game at, and by the time new games start to push CPUs notably harder, those games are likely to be better optimized for the Ryzen architecture.
About the only way I'd say Kaby Lake clearly comes out ahead, is if someone is using a 144Hz screen, and has a high-end graphics card with enough performance to push those kinds of frame rates in these demanding games. Of course, for most competitive first-person games, where high frame rates on a 144Hz screen might have the most impact, all these chips would once again perform similarly, since games like Overwatch or CS:GO are designed to keep CPU usage low to maintain high frame rates even on lower-end hardware.
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