Multicore gaming. Our future perspective with the new CPU generations?

Hey good people,

today, I would like to talk with you about gaming on PCs with high a processor core count. This discussion is driven by the newly released AMD CPUs aka Ryzen that offer a high number of CPU cores.

The question that most gamers face these days have is:

Do I go with

1. low core count (4/8) high clock speed CPU (5.0 Ghz) (e.g. i7 7700k)
2. high core count (8/16) low clock speed CPU (4Ghz) (e.g. Ryzen 1800x)

Which one should I buy?

If you are interested in current games, you can go on Youtube and look at one of the famous tech channels. They cover the speed and price ration of the CPUs with detailed benchmarks. But if u want to know the impact in the future, this is a complex topic with no clear answer. I want to discuss my point of view.

When can a game make use of many cores?
A huge factor for this topic is the type of game that u are looking at. If you want to make use of many cores the tasks that the CPU computes must be independent. Lets take for example a shooter gamer. What are tasks that the CPU has to compute?

1. Task: Player movement. (WASD) What is the next location?
2. Task: Can the player move to this location or are there obstacles in the way.
   -Subtask 1. Test player collision against obstacle with id 1
   -Subtask 2. Test player collision against obstacle with id 2
   -Subtask 3 Test player collision against obstacle with id 3
   -Subtask X ....
3. Task: Can he move to the new location?

Some of these tasks are sequential some are parallel. For example you can not compute the second task (collision tests) before you know where the player is moving. So Task 1 and Task 2 are sequential. The subtasks of the second task, on the other hand, do all the same and can be computed independently by any CPU core. Nevertheless, the task 3 can only be computed if all X cores has finished the subtasks. So this again is sequential.

What is the impact for future games?
If u have ever programmed multicore you know... Identifying which tasks are sequential and which are parallel is easy. The hard part is that there are tricks and algorithms to make sequential tasks partial parallel. This is time expensive and u need good game developers for this. And this is crucial for the future development and if we will see a benefit of multicore CPU (>16). An example that I like to present is the following popular game.

This game is on a low budget. It mainly uses only 1 core but this core is stressed up to 100%. This means the developers haven't yet focused on multicore. Why? Because it is complex and needs time/money. If you now consider high-value AAA gaming titles this is different. They more money at their disposal and can afford to put this effort early on. Meaning in many AAA titles you will in the future benefit from CPUS with a high core count.

What is the impact on our buying decision?
In my opinion, the buying decision is highly dependent on what type of games u are playing. If you are playing mainly AAA titles, I think you will highly benefit in the future from the new high count CPUs. They have the money and developers to invest into multicore programming. If you are more an indie gamer I would be more cautious.

At last, I want to point out, that I haven't touched the genre of games you are playing. E.g. Shooters benefit differently from many CPU cores than a strategy game. Any espeically simlulator are of their own kind. But this is another big topic. Perhaps for a future blog post.

What is your opinion? What type of CPUs are u going for in the future? Do you like the trend of high CPU count?

Feel free to comment and have a nice day
Schneid0r