Will GW2 benefit from an i7?

[Marmot]

I appreciate many individuals here don't know what GW2 is and frankly don't care. Guild Wars 2 is an upcoming MMORPG with a focus on large scale PvP battles (think Planetside). Potentially 100+ players on the screen at once, with detailed graphics.

I was talking to my friend earlier on vent, and to cut a long story short he has decided on buying a SB i7 for better performance in GW2. He maintains that with an i7 you would see a significant performance increase in large scale battles, over an i5.

It's a long shot I know, but is there anyone on here who knows whether this is the case? Would GW2 or similar games (PS2?) really benefit from the additional 2 cores and hyper threading capabilities that an i7 offers?

Many thanks.

 

[cmndr_andi]

I really wouldn't think an i7 would hold any performance advantage over an i5 in upcoming MMOs like Guild Wars 2 or Planetside 2.

I say this for two reasons:

-These games are made to be relatively low system intensity so that you don't need an uber machine to get in and playing (so they can have a large player base). This also generally means they are designed to make use of a small number of cores since many players will be playing the game on a dual core CPU and very few will have CPUs that offers more than four threads. For an i7 to see a performance advantage over an i5 the game needs to be able to make use of five or more threads. Also bear in mind that just because there may be large scale battles with lots of players/action doesn't mean that these battles will make use of multiple core - it is more likely that such situations will instead put increased load on a small number of cores

- When clocked at the same level and running applications that are lightly threaded (like games) and i5 and i7 perform exactly the same


Instead, I would strongly suggest spending the money that would have been spent to get an i7 on (one or a combination of):

- faster GPU
- aftermarket CPU cooler (so the i5 can be overclocked to ~4.5GHz)
- motherboard that overclocks well and supports CF/SLI (like this one)
- SSD (big enough to put the OS and the MMO games on)

 

[jakspyder]

Beta starts soon. Perhaps play the beta and find out. Then make a decision based on those results.