PCWorld: How many cores are useful for DX12.

Very interesting results. Seems like an Octocore or beyond processor is a bit under-utilized.

Source

To be completely honest, most games over the last near decade have been quad threaded and don't really take advantage of more than 4 cores, performance figures with hex and octo cores are almost mirrored.

The only advantages I see to hex and octo core CPU's as of now is for people doing advanced multi-tasking, rendering or game streaming, that's about it.

Do hexa/octo cores become more interesting if you are playing a video/browsing while playing a resource intensive game?
I do that all the time.

Looking at porn on a second screen while playing a game, damn you can multitask.

not that surprising at the moment.

at launch i dont expect to see a huge difference (hell some games have even had a regression from their DX11 performance when updated to use DX12 or vulkan). there is a lot of unlearning and relearning to be done to make the best of DX12 and vulkan and that will take time. even the tech demos are just learning.

it will take a couple of years to see software that really takes advantage of what these new APIs can allow.

Law of diminishing returns, I guess.

Last gen game engines (UE3) such as Gears of War Ultimate doesn't need quad core desktop CPUs.

Ashes is capable of about 60fps with an Intel dual core, Gears with only a single core, the rest is synthetic. The point of DX12 is to improve CPU efficiency, it's not going to magically start requiring more horsepower... Especially with the consoles being as weak as they are. The DX11 overhead test is pulling about 1 million drawcalls, the DX12 test is about 10+ million on 2c/4t.

It's like those razors with 4+ blades. You eventually don't need anymore blades; just better blades.

if Crackdown 3 area wide destruction effects was running on local PC, then there's an argument for Intel Core i7 Quad Core/8 Threads with 265bit AVX SIMD support.

This is for time being. I expect this to change in a year or two.

@horgen not sure if your sig is accurate, but have you considered oc'ing your ram? Quite good performance increase that doesn't cost you anything

just food for though as I have the same mobo + 980ti and 2600k at 4.6ghz

I have no idea how to do that. It would be nice having it at 1866 or 2000MHz I guess, but haven't bothered with it.

It's not rocket science and naturally google gives you very step by step guides.

As the recent digital foundry article about old 2500k's showed that the difference between 4.5ghz 2500k with 1600mhz ram vs 2133mhz is f.e in witcher 3 72.8fps vs 86.4fps so the gains aren't insignificant

It makes sense that quad cores are the sweet spot. They have been for a while. There are some games that are starting to take advantage of hyper-threading but even then the performance gain is minimal.

Unless you are doing some major multitasking or editing, a quad core is all you need for gaming.

That must be with iGPU.

@horgen: Titan X

here's the link:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-finally-time-to-upgrade-your-core-i5-2500k