Gaming clique

[Duffers]

I'm a PC gamer at heart, but do always have the latest Playstation too, sometimes a console is just better and easier

When it comes to gaming CPU upgrades offer very, very little, no game engines really push the CPU much in comparison to the GPU, many even push the 'AI' to the GPU graphical cores rather than pester the CPU.

I also think for gaming AMD annihilate Intel when it comes to price for performance.

Da fock?

We all ready for a Computer Science lesson now boys and girls? All nice and cosy? Got some caffeine to keep you awake, let's get into it.

The vast majority of modern games are very, very GPU intensive, it's why on a gaming PC the GPU is the most expensive component by far, and nowadays takes up the most case space. Now, how most Computer Programs work is relatively well known, the code resides on a hard drive until it's 'running' when it is loaded into RAM and each instruction is executed by the CPU as needed, for this reason, the more tasks the CPU can do at once (Cores) and the speed it can do them is important. This is ridiculously basic (I've not included any cache or buffering, hyper threading or anything.) 

Now, since the late 90's the GPU has dealt with instructions that related to graphics, the CPU doing absolutely nothing with these, in fact, the CPU doesn't even see them, past an instruction to send all these instructions over, which is dealt with before getting into the main CPU cycle. The vast, vast majority of code in a game is graphical code, so that's all going to the GPU, you can test this, run, even a high-end game on a PC, open Task Manager and you'll see the CPU load doesn't spike all that much. All the CPU does is manage the applications input, any AI and the data storage, nothing anymore taxing than a word processor or spreadsheet really. Of course, having a decent enough CPU to keep your PC running well overall is important, any bottlenecks are an issue, but in gaming, it makes very little real difference. 

Years ago, it was worked out that actually, for the vast majority of AI tasks, modern CPU's are actually over-engineered, it's better to have thousands of tiny cores running small instructions than a few running a few complicated ones. The difference between CPU and GPU? GPU's are hundreds or thousands of cores, only capable of relatively basic tasks, actually perfect for AI. Games aren't exactly known for massive data ordering and organisation with analysis, something a CPU is better suited for. Let's be fair, for many game developers, AI is still essentially a bunch of If-Else Statements a lot of the time. So therefore, why not send a few of these to the GPU too? It reduces strain on the CPU, which can help speed the game up, if the GPU isn't capable, or is busy, then we have the CPU to then go back to instead. This is still very new mind, and not sure how many games are using it fully, but I know Epic are looking at adding it to Unreal Engine, I do believe Unity has it built in, or can be added in. This is also where NVidia slays the competition, they actually have cores set aside for this, CUDA cores, if you look at any NVidia GPU it says how many CUDA cores it has, those are for this.

So yeah, unless you are regularly using your CPU to it's max, I'd always advise spending the money on the GPU, or even faster storage devices.

And this is why I own consoles.