In the higher ranges of Intel and AMD, in terms of CPU, we find beasts of 12 and 16 cores at very high prices. Is it worth overpaying for additional processor cores? How does this affect gaming performance? Well, we have decided to explain to you how performance scales in general as the central processing unit becomes wider.
One of the clearest similes regarding the necessary performance of a computer is that of a factory, in it the resources that we have in excess are the workers who, as long as they have work to do, will perform at their best. However, having most of them unemployed represents an incredible loss in wages. Everyone knows that you don’t need a Gaming PC to do office work. But what happens when we have additional cores in the processor than the requirements of the most demanding game or application?
The OS will always use the extra cores
We must bear in mind that in terms of software programs, each of them is made up of several processes, some of them interact with each other, while other parts do so alone. We call the first ones parallel code and it is possible to increase the speed by increasing the number of cores in the system. In the second case, the acceleration is achieved by increasing the number of instructions that a CPU in a certain period of time. So with each generation progress is sought on both fronts.
Now, a disadvantage that the PC has compared to the consoles is in the allocation of resources. In a gaming-only system, a single core is typically assigned to the system, and all background applications that are not being used sit idle in a portion of the system’s RAM. When we press the menu button on the controller, then the game will wait in the RAM section and we can move with part of the resources through the menu. The problem is that a PC doesn’t work like that, since on a computer we have a complete operating system running in multitasking mode and a large number of applications fighting for hardware resources.
It is the operating system , whatever it may be, that assigns the processes according to the resources available in the hardware and will always seek to find the greatest number of cores possible with the different processes. Many times there won’t be enough processes to keep them all busy, other times the workload will be so great that having extra cores available becomes a blessing.
General gaming performance
We have said it many times, but we are going to repeat it, since it is important to understand the performance in video games. In each frame that we see on the screen, the processor has to calculate the situation of each of the elements that you see and generate what we call the screen list, which is a series of instructions that tell the graphics card what to draw . If the processor is not very powerful, then a good part of the time corresponding to each frame will be occupied in said task and even if we have an acceptable frame rate, this will come from the speed of our graphics. That is, there will be a performance bottleneck on the CPU side.
In today’s games there are two approaches to performance. The first is that the frame rate is fixed, to achieve this the resolution fluctuates and the application of certain effects to reach the expected speed, affecting the image quality if the processor does not have enough power and has consumed a good part weather. The second is to let the frame rate not be limited to a number, but in that case a less powerful processor can be a bottleneck and get fewer frames per second under the same conditions.
What happens if I have too many cores when playing?
However, what concerns us is knowing what happens if a system is more powerful. That is why we have explained the way in which the system assigns the processes. Simply, a kernel overloaded with them is going to have to solve them, so it is important not to have applications in the background that can consume resources . This is also why anti-pira-cy solutions like Denuvo are highly unpopular.
In most cases, games are optimized to run at the number of cores and threads that their recommended specs set, so having more of that won’t be an improvement unless we’re doing other things. at the same time as streaming and we’re encoding per CPU. But there are scenes in games that are extremely complex and suddenly we see a drop in frame rate. Well, if it turns out that the operating system knows that there are additional cores to assign the work to, then it will do so and you will see a performance increase with it.
However, and with this we finish, the profits will be reduced if we increase the number of cores. Having a processor with 12 cores and 24 threads today is not essential to play , but it has been shown that they deliver extra performance. 16 cores and 32 threads manage to increase, but more slightly. In any case, betting on these CPUs is paying more to get a system that allows you to play properly for years.