Gaming - how low can you go for 60FPS?

[MoonBoots]

I see a lot of posts recommending £300+ CPUs like the 5800X3D or 7800X3D, but looking at benchmarks it seems that even low end modern CPUs easily get well over 60FPS in most games, sometimes well over 100FPS. So if you're targeting 60FPS and don't use your PC for anything other than gaming wouldn't you be far better off getting something like a 5700 or 7600 for £150-200ish and putting the cash you've saved towards the GPU? Even the 7600 looks a bit excessive for 60FPS based on the benchmarks I've seen, other than a few beastly games like Starfield.

Or am I missing something?

 

[alec]

Yes, you are right
And this time without many caveats
For example https://www.techspot.com/review/2615-ryzen-7600-vs-ryzen-5600/
even 13100 is enough for 60fps

 

[Tetras]

So if you're targeting 60FPS and don't use your PC for anything other than gaming wouldn't you be far better off getting something like a 5700 or 7600 for £150-200ish and putting the cash you've saved towards the GPU?

Yeah, but most of the posts on here are either for AM4 upgrades, or for new gaming rigs, with decent graphics (e.g. 4070 / 7800 XT or higher) and the 5800X3D/7800X3D are the best gaming CPUs if you can afford one.

 

[MoonBoots]

Yeah, but most of the posts on here are either for AM4 upgrades, or for new gaming rigs, with decent graphics (e.g. 4070 / 7800 XT or higher) and the 5800X3D/7800X3D are the best gaming CPUs if you can afford one.

Sure, although I imagine even at the 4070 / 7800 XT level you'd still be very much GPU bottlenecked even with a £150 CPU? Except for eSports titles at 1080p I guess.

I suppose the argument is that CPUs are more of a pain to upgrade (especially when the socket is no longer supported) so if you can get a much better CPU for just an extra £200 its worth it for future proofing because the cheaper CPU might not even give you enough of a saving to move up a single GPU tier anyway.

 

[Tetras]

Sure, although I imagine even at the 4070 / 7800 XT level you'd still be very much GPU bottlenecked even with a £150 CPU? Except for eSports titles at 1080p I guess.

You would have been, yeah, there was a point that a CPU on the level of a Ryzen 3600 or 10600K was pretty much enough for everything, but newer games like Cyberpunk and Starfield are definitely changing the arguments with CPU power.

I suppose the argument is that CPUs are more of a pain to upgrade (especially when the socket is no longer supported) so if you can get a much better CPU for just an extra £200 its worth it for future proofing because the cheaper CPU might not even give you enough of a saving to move up a single GPU tier anyway.

There's also a lot less you can do if your CPU is too slow, because changing the settings does nearly nothing, whereas with the graphics card you can lower the res, use upscaling tech, change the details.

Personally, I wouldn't overspend on the CPU either, because the £200 usually gets you more cores, rather than more punch for games. The X3Ds are a special case, because of how much extra FPS you get when the game loves the cache.