After a surprisingly long time where I saw no reason to upgrade my machine at all and mostly played old indie games, I’m looking at least replacing my video card for Cyberpunk, Control, etc. And I realize that I have paid absolutely now attention to the consumer CPU market for the last several years. Steam popped up a hardware survey and my CPU seemed slower than average, but clock rate seems like an imprecise measurement. I bought a Intel i7-8700 Coffee Lake back in October of 2017 and remember thinking it was absurdly fast then, but that’s 2 1/2 years old now.
I bought my processor in 2009 (i7 920). I’ve upgraded the RAM and graphics card several times, but I can still run most newer games at high settings without issue. Processors just aren’t the bottleneck they once were.
Intel will still eke out a win on most games, as many still can’t make full enough use of Ryzen’s core advantage, and the pricing battle is making some Intel options viable at some levels for pure FPS. If you do much of anything else on the PC, or just care about heat and power consumption at all, Ryzen will easily win out virtually across the board. Including if you record / stream your own gaming.
That said, an x700-caliber Intel chip from two years ago, paired with a high end video card, will make mincemeat of just about anything you throw at it. You can make fuller use of your ultra high end 144hz 4K HDR display with a few extra FPS on a handful of titles if you want to shell out not insignificant bucks for a newest gen high tier Intel chip alongside a badass video card, but it’s a pretty narrow edge case.
What is your current GPU that you use with that CPU ?
I have a RTX2080 and a 7700k , and I know my CPU is mildly holding back my 2080. According to the calculator below its around 16-17% of a cpu bottleneck for me.
I would hope you are fine, I’m using an 8700k (paired with a 2070) and having no problem with anything I have downloaded from XGP, including Metro Exodus.
Almost the exact same situation here, except I have the 2080ti so my bottleneck is more severe at 25%. I’m also waiting to see the new Ryzens before breaking out the wallet.
Though @Chris_Gwinn will be happy to know that the bottleneck calculator above recommends I upgrade to an i7-8700k… ;)
Since we are playing the “more decrepit than thou” game I also see no pressing need* to upgrade my E3-1230 of similar vintage, coupled with the blistering speed of an HD7850.
At some point AMD is going to stop issuing driver updates for this now 8-year old card, although since they are still selling GCN cards today, that may not be for a few more years yet.
*As opposed to want, but I would just end up playing Civ 6 on a modern firebreather, and the current machine does that just fine.
I’m kinda curious when I’ll finally be interested in a title that needs more than the 290X I bought off wumpus back in the day. Which is, by about 2 price brackets, the nicest video card for its generation I’ve ever owned.
Driver updates aside, the day I move on from the current setup will probably be when I can double the thread count (16 vs 8 today) and get comparable performance from integrated graphics. AMD is really close with their as yet unreleased 4000-series, so I imagine next year would hit that sweet spot. To go from 200W to ~65W, with greatly improved CPU and also better video encoders/decoders…that’s absolutely worth it. Then I’ll sit on my ass for another ten years, I hope.
Yeah, in my case, I’d ideally like to roughly double performance/move up about 2-3 tiers on the Tom’s chart before investing again. Which means I need to be scoping out, like 1080ti’s still, so, lol.
Mind, due to Computer Dumb, I did end up upgrading to a Ryzen 3700X for processor last year. Don’t foresee a need to upgrade that for a long, long time.
You need more cores these days with many game engines and console ports since 2018.Had to upgrade from my i5 4670k in 2018 as it was bottlenecking my GTX 1080 Ti by 25-40%
Oh, definitely. I’m not going to buy anything until the consumer Ampere cards show up.
I’m currently at “budget X dollars and pay attention to video cards” and am wondering if I need to go to “budget X + 500 and pay attention to computer builds”.
