is the i7 8700 still going to be a decent gaming CPU for the next few years

[greatash]

Hyperthreading has been shown to generally decrease performance or have no impact. This may change as games demand more threads to run at all, but for now hyperthreading is a boon to tasks like encoding and compilation, not gaming. It takes scheduling resources away from primary threads.

maybe in 2012 when games only used 4 threads, but nowadays the 4c/8t cpus massively outperform the 4c/4t parts especially with minimums and stutter.

games like Kingdom come and Battlefield 1/5 barely run on 4 threads whereas the 8 threaded cpus are fine

 

[chrcoluk]

This was explained in the AMD thread, I posted a link to some really nice info regarding the impact of threads on DX11, with nvidia CMDLIST, but given there was no reply to that post I think no one read it.

Under normal circumstances HTT only really helps when a core is under very heavy load like maxed out so e.g. rendering tasks like cinebench. When stuff is natively multithreaded and does "not" max out cpu cores I would expect the impact of HTT to be very low.

So older i7 cpus hanging on more than i5 would be for two reasons in my opinion.

Older gen cpus are getting maxed out in some newer games now. So in those situations the benefit of HTT will increase, it wont be the same as in cinebench where the core is really pegged, but it would be higher benefit than moderate load.

Second reason is nvidia CMDLIST. On DX11 draw calls natively are single threaded, and you have a problem of the main thread getting too much work to do, and unless the per core performance is high enough to avoid a bottleneck then things slow down (AMD DX11 drivers). Nvidia added a hack that slices up the draw call load evenly across hardware threads, so if you have 8 threads you have 1/8th of draw calls on main thread, if you have 4 hardware threads youy have 1/4 of draw calls on main thread, even if the other threads have lots of spare capacity it doesnt matter, it just slices up based on hardware thread count. So basically you can eek out a bit more performance with HTT in that situation "IF" the main thread is saturated.

Given DX12 and vulkan should spread load across cpu threads more efficiently, then the main thread issue should be less of an issue and it should reduce impact of HTT noticeably, but I could be wrong, but thats what I would expect providing the cpu itself is "not" maxed out, once it is maxed out then reason #1 comes into play again. It is also why AMD have seen big gains on DX12.

8600k, 2600x and 8700k are in that kind of middle ground where they not 4 core or 8 core but 6 core chips. I think as far as 8700k and 2600X go they both have nothing to worry about, 6 cores 12 threads, the only concern will be if the per core performance on a 2600X is good enough. The 8600k has no HTT so is limited to 6 hardware threads, this from tests I have seen is enough to not have it see the issues that 4 core i5's have had. But for sure it will be a possible issue going forward, after that I learned about CMDLIST and how I have seen cpu utilisation creep on games, as a 8600k owner I have some concern but I think I will be fine for at least a few years and thats as an 8600k owner with no HTT, a 8700k owner with HTT I think will be absolutely fine.

I think we have got to the point now tho where intel need to scrap their HTT tax, and just have all i5's and i7's with HTT as standard like AMD do with their stuff.

 

[DragonQ]

I suspect the 6c/12t nature of my CPU is helping it hang on but even then it's holding back my GPU in some games. Far Cry 5 is particularly CPU-bound and my GPU only averages around 75% usage in most areas. Coffee Lake or even Broadwell-E 6c/12t CPUs should last a couple more years before doing the same really.

 

[chrcoluk]

Yeah you have an older gen with ddr3 ram, so I can see you in the older cpu category.

Been looking into my ram timings and my sub timings are pretty bad, it seems on XMP profile only modifies primary timings, and the secondary are really conservative, I am going to try and get my ram stable at 3000CL12 instead of 3000CL14 and also optimise the secondary, even if I cannot get CL12 going I will still optimise the secondary, some of which are really loose.

 

[chrcoluk]

One of jayz's better videos for sure.

He emulated a 7100 2c/4t 3.9ghz then does 8100 4c/4t 3.6ghz, note even with 300mhz loss, massive performance boost.

 

[Brazo]

I suspect the 6c/12t nature of my CPU is helping it hang on but even then it's holding back my GPU in some games. Far Cry 5 is particularly CPU-bound and my GPU only averages around 75% usage in most areas. Coffee Lake or even Broadwell-E 6c/12t CPUs should last a couple more years before doing the same really.

Might be something else in your rig Because even an i3 is smashing cpu benchmarks in far cry 5. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Far_Cry_5/4.html

 

[DragonQ]

Might be something else in your rig Because even an i3 is smashing cpu benchmarks in far cry 5. https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Performance_Analysis/Far_Cry_5/4.html

Depends what you mean by "smashing". I get ~60 FPS on ultra settings at 1440p with my Vega 56, just like their graphs show. GPU usage is ~75% though.

 

[Brazo]

Depends what you mean by "smashing". I get ~60 FPS on ultra settings at 1440p with my Vega 56, just like their graphs show. GPU usage is ~75% though.

That’s simply gpu limited. An i3 gets 120fps at 720p. The fact that your gpu is only at 75% shows a different problem. What % is your cpu working at?

To quote techpowerup.

Far Cry 5 runs extremely well on even slower processors. It's also worth mentioning that reaching 144 FPS is possible with most processors.

 

[DragonQ]

That’s simply gpu limited. An i3 gets 120fps at 720p. The fact that your gpu is only at 75% shows a different problem. What % is your cpu working at?

To quote techpowerup.

Far Cry 5 runs extremely well on even slower processors. It's also worth mentioning that reaching 144 FPS is possible with most processors.

CPU is at ~40%, so neither CPU nor GPU is running at full pelt. Turning down settings barely improves FPS.

 

[zola25]

CPU is at ~40%, so neither CPU nor GPU is running at full pelt. Turning down settings barely improves FPS.

Do you have v-sync or any other form of frame limiter enabled?

 

[DragonQ]

Do you have v-sync or any other form of frame limiter enabled?

Frame limited at 142 FPS but doesn't hit anywhere near that. This screenshot is usage whilst getting ~65 FPS:

 

[chrcoluk]

You may be suffering from the AMD dx11 drawcall problem, on AMD cards, main cpu thread can get saturated.

I would expect symptons from that that you would have a gpu not maxed out, check, cpu only main thread maxed out but not entire cpu, possible check

The windows cpu scheduler is constantly moving thread loads from core to core so loads look evenly spread across cores, often painting a false picture, so this might be your issue.

I am definitely not 100% confident tho just that it might be the problem.

If I am right, your performance will go down if you throttled the cpu, so that would be a way to check if cpu is bottlenecking, temporarily slow it down, reload the game, and see if the fps drops, even tho you "appear" to have spare cpu cycles.

 

[DragonQ]

You may be suffering from the AMD dx11 drawcall problem, on AMD cards, main cpu thread can get saturated.

I would expect symptons from that that you would have a gpu not maxed out, check, cpu only main thread maxed out but not entire cpu, possible check

The windows cpu scheduler is constantly moving thread loads from core to core so loads look evenly spread across cores, often painting a false picture, so this might be your issue.

I am definitely not 100% confident tho just that it might be the problem.

If I am right, your performance will go down if you throttled the cpu, so that would be a way to check if cpu is bottlenecking, temporarily slow it down, reload the game, and see if the fps drops, even tho you "appear" to have spare cpu cycles.

As far as I can tell, it's just a poorly optimised game that is reliant on single thread CPU performance. I am not sure what the people claiming it's amazingly optimised are basing that on. If a game has the same performance with a 2c/4t CPU as it does with a 6c/12t CPU, that doesn't necessarily mean it's GPU limited: it can just as easily mean it's bottlenecked by 1-2 threads and therefore isn't taking advantage of the faster CPU. The way I would normally check for this is to look at GPU usage, which lo and behold suggests that this title is CPU limited.

I was going to try to peg the game to the 6 real cores but Ubisoft's anti-cheat crap prevents this without doing some hacks and I cannot be arsed.

 

[Brazo]

As far as I can tell, it's just a poorly optimised game that is reliant on single thread CPU performance. I am not sure what the people claiming it's amazingly optimised are basing that on. If a game has the same performance with a 2c/4t CPU as it does with a 6c/12t CPU, that doesn't necessarily mean it's GPU limited: it can just as easily mean it's bottlenecked by 1-2 threads and therefore isn't taking advantage of the faster CPU. The way I would normally check for this is to look at GPU usage, which lo and behold suggests that this title is CPU limited.

I was going to try to peg the game to the 6 real cores but Ubisoft's anti-cheat crap prevents this without doing some hacks and I cannot be arsed.

It just means it’s a non cpu intensive game. It will practically run on a bottle top. But yes it appears it needs two strong cores and I’m afraid that does rule out an older xeon cpus.

This does however perfectly highlight the point of this thread though that moar cores are irrelevant in most gaming scenarios. A million core AMD cpu won’t touch a four core intel when (most) games only use four cores.