I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much
anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...
That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.
Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high and I really hoped to have some headroom (3 years at least) with a 6700 when I bought it 8 months ago. I never expected it to be nearly maxed out by the end of 2016.
But I don't want to complain to much here, I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.
CPUs may show 90-100% usage but that doesn't mean the CPU is literally maxed out, it could and usually does have more to give, I've seen this a lot in GTA V.
How you can tell if you're truly CPU limited is if your GPU usage is below 95-99%
One thing you could try is changing the CPU affinity in Task Manager to only use 4 cores, that would be "CPU 0-3" for quad core i7 processors, you could even disable hyper-threading in the bios as this could give you a better idea of how it would perform on a 4 core processor.
If you use Task Manager to disable the threads then you would be able to see how the game scales from 4 to 8 threads while it's running, if your GPU usage is notably lower as you disable the cores/threads then the game is scaling past 4 threads, you could then check the performance increase from enabling each one.
It would be really good to see this performs with a 6 or 8 core processor, as you could see how it scales from 4-8 cores, and even the logical processors from hyper-threading.
EDIT: I was wrong about the CPU affinity, I think it should be core 0, 2, 4 and 6 for the 4 cores of a quad core i7, I sincerely apologies for any confusion caused.
I think people really need to start posting their cpus when reporting about bad game performance, because things like: game runs bad on my 'insert high-end-gpu' doesn't mean much
anymore.
But in a way I get it, CPU power was mostly irrelevant for a very long time. The 2500k is now nearly 6 years old and it is still good enough for many games (overclocked), but at the same time CPU requirements seems to rise extremely fast (real requirements, not the nonsense printed on boxes), especially in open world games.
Watch Dogs 2 is a new high when it comes to CPU power. This thing can max out a 6700k (4.5ghz). I recently used a crane to reach a paint job location and wondered why my cpu fan suddenly spiked...
That's of course an extreme example, but 70%+ per thread while driving at high speed through the city is pretty normal.
Is this kind of CPU hunger justified? Buildings in the 'crane scene' look very detailed to me and afaik high LOD and draw distance were always stressful for cpus, but I'm just a pc hobbyist and not a coding expert, so I can't really judge that. I'm also not defending WD2 here, system requirements are extremely high and I really hoped to have some headroom (3 years at least) with a 6700 when I bought it 8 months ago. I never expected it to be nearly maxed out by the end of 2016.
But I don't want to complain to much here, I just want to motivate people to start posting CPU specs alongside their gpus when reporting about performance.
CPUs may show 90-100% usage but that doesn't mean the CPU is literally maxed out, it could and usually does have more to give, I've seen this a lot in GTA V.
How you can tell if you're truly CPU limited is if your GPU usage is below 95-99%
One thing you could try is changing the CPU affinity in Task Manager to only use 4 cores, that would be "CPU 0-3" for quad core i7 processors, you could even disable hyper-threading in the bios as this could give you a better idea of how it would perform on a 4 core processor.
If you use Task Manager to disable the threads then you would be able to see how the game scales from 4 to 8 threads while it's running, if your GPU usage is notably lower as you disable the cores/threads then the game is scaling past 4 threads, you could then check the performance increase from enabling each one.
It would be really good to see this performs with a 6 or 8 core processor, as you could see how it scales from 4-8 cores, and even the logical processors from hyper-threading.
EDIT: I was wrong about the CPU affinity, I think it should be core 0, 2, 4 and 6 for the 4 cores of a quad core i7, I sincerely apologies for any confusion caused.
EDIT2: I'm not even sure about which cores are physical anymore.