In this article, we’ll look at the question of how much does CPU matter in gaming. We’ll also discuss whether or not a GPU is necessary for gaming and what the future holds for gaming processors.
What is a gaming processor?
A gaming processor (or CPU, if you will) is basically a CPU that has been specialized to handle intensive calculations while playing games. This advantages include being able to process data at speeds much faster than your average computer processor and can do this with greater power efficiency as well.
While it’s true that overclockers have always had the ability overclocking their processors for particular tasks such as image editing or content creation, performance in games has been limited largely because of performance degradation from overvolting and dropping voltages. However, with better cooling methods in the gaming processor ring that have come about recently, this is no longer a problem.
Why does CPU matter in gaming?
A CPU is necessary for gaming because it modifies the game’s appearance. The way a games looks, including textures and effects as well as resolutions may be inversely related to PC performance.
Players must have an acceptable amount of processing power both while they are playing and when they don’t play at all otherwise their PCs will lag badly or run unusable hot causing the user to overheat which can lead burn out on parts resulting in permanent damage.
How much does CPU matter in Gaming?
The more processing power a gaming PC has, the better its performance will be. In other words, the higher you stack CPU levels on your rig and just that for all four cores of it (as CPUs do not have individual cores) effects how well everything performs in games. The best computers out there today with high-end processors offer up to sixteen compute threads at this time which is also called V56T*16 due to AMD’s naming system. This means that in a Quad Core CPU, it can operate up to 16 underlying cores.
However this does not mean you will actually get all 4 core but rather estimate how many threads there are as the actual processing power of each thread is different per game and depends on what kind of processor your using also.
Checkout: How to Monitor CPU and GPU Temperature While Gaming
There is a difference between CPU and GPU in the Gaming field:
GPU is for Video and GFX card. This means that it operates at a completely different architecture which does not require having to keep track of critical processes (paging, MMU processing). This frees up more IOPs for CPU-related tasks such as gaming on top of GPU workloads including task scheduling priorities etc..
The reason why this can be good in gaming – because processors may be able to schedule tasks in parallel while running several graphics apps. This is because they aren’t “pinning” a thread until it’s done and thus can hop between CPU processes that are not GPU-related. Hence users don’t have to wait as much when gaming on multiple applications, because somewhere there will be space available for one of them as long there are no IOPs waiting on MMU aliasing (paging) etc..
A faster CPU allows for smoother game play
Better performance in games most often comes down to better processor efficiency. Think of it this way: What would happen if I threw a ball (the CPU) at the computer screen? The faster your CPU is capable of throwing, the more likely you are going to hit that target and consequently score points for your team! Of course, there’s no set minimum speed required though; generally speaking having an Intel i7 with hyper-threading and running on SSD would be a good choice for top performance.
Games are not just graphics driven
You can play a game with mediocre graphics on a low-end CPU and have optimal results. Sure, you might not be able to crank it up as high as the next guy but that is easily solved!
Common sense again – what does this mean? Simply put, if I install your favourite gaming processor for an i5 or higher then my laptops battery will feature at least 3x just like yours would (probably longer!). Why? Because the CPU is not going to waste power running at minimum, idle clock speed; it’d rather be using all that energy for your normal workload. More generally than this of course – having a better CPU allows me to run more applications and thus make use of the graphics card with less available IOPs (for video playback/video editing etc..)
Conclusion
The CPU is the most important part of a gaming computer. The CPU is what handles all of the calculations that are done in games. It helps to increase the frame rate and quality of your game, but also decreases lag by running multiple processes at once. So if you want to run fast paced games such as Counter Strike, or even Overwatch, you will need a high-end processor. If you’re just looking for something that can play some older games without breaking a sweat, then maybe you don’t need an Intel i5 or i7 processor.