What does it take for a game to be 'CPU intensive'?

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jamspls

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I often hear people say that a GPU is the defining factor for graphics, but there have been instances where the CPU is much more responsible than usual for graphics (arguably sharing an equally intense workload than a GPU.)

What exactly is it that a CPU does for these types of games; and what would make (for example) a high end Skylake perform better than a mid-low(er) end Skylake?
 
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There are two types of "CPU intensive" :
- games that rely heavily on one or two performance-critical threads and will perform best on CPUs with the highest single-threaded performance (99.9% of games currently in existence)
- games that can leverage multi-threading and will scale more evenly with core count

With predominantly single-threaded games, the game can be considered "CPU-intensive" when the performance-critical part of that thread exceeds the single-threaded performance of what can be considered a mainstream CPU and becomes the dominant bottleneck.

Multi-threaded games are much the same, except that the performance-critical parts may be more spread out across threads. Once any one of those threads' workload exceeds what a...
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Titan
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There are two types of "CPU intensive" :
- games that rely heavily on one or two performance-critical threads and will perform best on CPUs with the highest single-threaded performance (99.9% of games currently in existence)
- games that can leverage multi-threading and will scale more evenly with core count

With predominantly single-threaded games, the game can be considered "CPU-intensive" when the performance-critical part of that thread exceeds the single-threaded performance of what can be considered a mainstream CPU and becomes the dominant bottleneck.

Multi-threaded games are much the same, except that the performance-critical parts may be more spread out across threads. Once any one of those threads' workload exceeds what a typical mainstream CPU can handle with all of the background stuff thrown in, the CPU becomes the bottleneck again.
 
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JanHyka

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When coding a game, there are many tasks that can be done both on CPU and GPU. Even on purely graphics. Deciding how much each game/engine takes on specific component is an architectural step. Since all the resources are limited, you need to decide as an architect what runs where... So let's say hypothetically you spend a lot of cpu on AI so there is very little left for graphics... you try to move as much as possible of it to gpu since it makes more sense than pushing there AI calculations and then download back the results.

Academical example of where high end skylake can perform better... bear in mind it's never that simple, but for our case good enough. You run realtime strategy with very complex ai. You have many faction fighting each other... so each faction AI can run in a thread that gets scheduled on one logical cpu... When you have 4 logical cpu machine, let's say 1 core is reserved for graphics, music, whatever and other 3 are shared between 15 competing AIs... now, same scenario, just with 20 logical cpus.... those 15AIs are spread to 15 logical CPUs, no competition for logical cpu resources and there are still 4 taking nap.
But as I said, in real scenario it's much more complicated.
 
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