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TESTED: Does core count HELP or HURT gaming performance?

2018-06-02
what's up guys Jays $0.02 here we're gonna talk about a topic I haven't touched in quite a few years actually the last time I did anything similar to this video was back when I had my 3770k system and I was trying to see where bottle necking started to intrude in battlefield 3 but we're doing a little bit more broad testing today and we're gonna see what happens when we take our 8700 K and we do a full gamut of testing at 6 cores 12 threads no overclock or anything just out of the box settings we're gonna cut it down to a 4 core and then a 2 core and we're gonna see if we get any sort of fall-off telling us whether or not the CPU race we've seen over the last couple of years has actually benefitted to a better gaming experience for gamers across the board with its adjustable pmw 3367 16,000 dpi optical sensor for RGB zones 9 customizable buttons and offering both wired and wireless operation are only a few reasons why the corsair dark court RGB should be on your shortlist for your next mouths purchase check out its full list of features by clicking the link in the description below so like I mentioned in the intro I haven't done this in a while last time was a 3770k with battlefield 3 and that was just one title that painted one picture and didn't give really any sort of substance because it was it should have been this battlefield 3 bottleneck with a low end CPU we're not actually gonna be checking for bottlenecks today reason for that is where I've only got one CPU that I'm testing with an 8700 K that I'm going into the BIOS on Asus and changing the configuration of how many cores are active under if you guys knew you could do that most motherboards that are overclocking friendly can also allow you to go in there and start turning off course you can do this testing yourself at home if you want to see if your CPU will start to bottleneck your GPU as you disable course so we did this three different ways we did 1080p testing and 4k testing in 9 different titles heaven benchmark Metro last light dirt rally far cry 5 rise of the Tomb Raider shadow of Mordor hitman time spy and fire strike the reason why I chose those titles it's a good mix of new and old demanding titles shadow of Mordor also had the HD HD texture pack which are the HD pack whatever they call it which bumped up some demand a little bit but not too much that was a very demanding title back in its day far cry 5 being the newest title on this list which is known be fairly CPU and GPU intensive but it's also important to note I'm using the built-in benchmarks on these tests because having something on a rail is the only way to get consistent results to actually measure any sort of difference but the actual gameplay experience could definitely differ from the actual benchmark also to all of these titles I have pretty much everything maxed out so what we're looking for here is how the game performance and FPS average FPS scales as we start to either add or remove cores now hyper-threading is on in all of these tests so essentially what I've got right here is an 8700 K fully unlocked not overclocked but all cores are synched so technically it's an overclock because all cores will go up to the turbo clock weather rather than just one or two cores and the ddr4 is running at its native 21 33 megahertz not a higher like 3200 or anything like that and the Titan XP in here which is also not overclocked but does have the fan curve cranked to make sure that thermal throttling does not become a factor we want to keep things as consistent as possible so with that said let's go ahead and jump into the benchmark so you guys will see the slides and then we'll do some live gameplay because the slides only tell part of the story so the results actually surprised me enough to where I had only done two core and six core testing undecided to go ahead and do all the tests again with four core and of course 4k and 1080p in all of these titles because the results were a little bit surprising where I think we're gaining obviously in those slides you could see things were very very close within margin of error and at a point which the user would probably never notice there was a difference headed in a blind taste test between a two core four thread and a six core 12 thread in any one of these titles what would the exception of Metro last slide I mean I think we saw weather was a huge FPS difference one hundred and forty two point nine five with two core and 1080p versus two hundred eleven point eight nine that was obviously our biggest reduction and then we had in hitman one hundred and thirty seven point three two with a six core versus eighty seven point two two were the two course that was a 50 FPS hit in 1080p but in 4k once we do high resolution high settings and were asked asking the GPU to do so much the GPU slows down to a point to where even a slower CPU like a two core four thread is not being the limiting factor in the amount of FPS that we're getting now also to it's important note this is a sixty Hertz panel and pretty much every single one of our results here was above sixty which means we would have probably never noticed it had we had vsync or g-sync this is a g-sync panel if we had those features turned on then we would have just seen a lock 60fps every single one of our tests and it wouldn't mattered but if you're running a super high refresh rate panel like 144 200 or even a 240 like the see sonic panels then you would have probably started to notice a little bit of difference there in terms of these 50 FPS variants 2 core and 6 core were not as far apart as I was expecting them to be 4k I expected them to be very very similar the four core and the six core obviously very very close very hard to distinguish a difference between them I'm sure the sharp the charts the chart the charts showed that so yeah but there's another thing we have to test here we need to test for things like dips and stutters because what this these charts don't show you is in a perfect scenario yes the FPS is very similar but what happens if you start running a background task what if there's a background update taking place with Steam is upload updating or installing something in the background if you have that enabled what if you have Google tabs open you know Google uses GPU as well and Google can actually if you have a lot of tab open the tabs open chrome can actually be quite intensive on your CPU so there's a lot of different things here that this test doesn't actually show you because they were perfect examples so let's go ahead and turn around let's get into a game or two here in real time to look for things like dips and stutters because that's gonna affect your overall gameplay more so than any average fps so here's our FPS counter right here here's a graph for you guys to see any sort of crazy dips and stuff we are actually rendering the game now see I'm looking around here and this is our GPU utilization now you'll notice this number doesn't pay at 99 like it typically does in games because as this number goes up which is a CPU usage the GP usage is going to go down that will also be reminiscent here of the temperature the higher this number gets the higher that number gets the higher these get the lower these gets so that is effectively what I hate to even call a bottleneck but it kind of sort of is but you can see we're still getting an awful lot of fps right here even when our GPU usage is not completely pegged so the helicopter view just turned to point at the ground and look at that look how far at PS came down into the 60s right so this is definitely going to be an interesting experience here I think all right so now I'm actually able to free look obviously we look down or FPS goes up look at the sky or FPS goes up look straight ahead so it starts doing things yeah so as I look down loo that our fps is still really high it's not really redrawing any images but there are CPU just sitting in the game here I always heard that this guy chops down trees for a living I'm pretty sure look at this right here I mean depending on where we're looking I'm wondering though how much of that will change if we do like you know obviously four core or six core all right so we're back in the same airplane or helicopter see as we were before but notice this now our GP usage is much higher because our CPU is definitely playing hot potato with the cores but look at how divided up that workload is amongst the CPUs so far cry 5 and a lot more FPS here than we had before a lot more consistent - far cry 5 definitely appears to be one of those titles that is taking advantage of the multi-threaded workload well we're gonna wait for right now is the part where it turns and looks down because that was where it dipped into like the 60fps 50 FPS ok here we go let's look at that we look down and we still dipped for sure but nowhere near as low as we did before last time it was well into the 50s CPU is still handling a workload and passing it around as multi-threaded workloads are supposed to do but it's pretty obvious now that far cry 5 is an example of one of those titles that will definitely give you a better experience with multicores but we're not seeing seeing nearly as many low dips though on the four core or the two core for thread we were seeing a lot more of these low dips so what you can take away from today's video is the fact that CPUs are definitely improving and that's because of the competition finally taking place in the PC space I would love or the CPU space rather I would love to see this level of competition taking place in the GPU space so obviously we're still waiting to see what's coming on the horizon for both Nvidia and AMD maybe we'll learn some stuff at Computex and what's coming I have no idea if you feel I should do this video with an AMD processor let me know which one you think I should use we're in an interesting place with AMD because we just had new hardware launch for the Rison 2nd gen I guess they're kind of calling it's more like a 1.5 but I'll do it again maybe I'll take something like a 2700 and then our 2700 X and shave it down to like an 8 a 6 and a 4 I don't know we'll see you guys let me know what you think I should do my prediction on that it would be very very similar to what you saw today just different max FPS or average FPS numbers but the same type of scaling between resolutions because as we've seen games are definitely taking advantage of multi-core more than they were say five or six years ago meaning that you no longer have to worry about what CPU you get for your gaming experience just make sure that you pair your GPU and your panel I think pairing the panel on the GPU is more important than pairing the GPU and the CPU because this setup makes no sense with a 60 Hertz panel if we're playing it in 1080p but it makes perfect sense if we're playing in 4k and even the two core for thread variants of what we just did right here with a titin XP and a 4k panel would have made perfect sense but not in 1080p anyway guys if you think I should have done this test differently or you think we should revisit something here that we may have missed let me know in the comments below I like to kind of tweak our test to try and hit the center mass of the audience on I'm trying to get videos that are relevant on these testing topics but let me know what you guys thought in the comments below we'll hope to see you guys at Computex we'll be uploading a quite a bit of content giving you a very unique hopefully a unique first-person type of perspective of what it's like to attend the world's largest PC Expo but with that said guys it's time to go thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one you
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