How does having more cores and threads help get better performance in games?

[d.madnwild123]

i know its recommended to have a 4 core CPU for gaming but how does the game utilize the Cores? and what point will having more core not help the performance. Same with threads, I've seen games get higher frame rates on CPU's that only have higher thread counts. how do games utilize them and at what point will there not be a difference in performance?

Last thing, does hyper-threading do anything in terms of gaming?

 

[Wolfshadw]

Games have to be coded to take advantage of available cores/threads. Otherwise, the only benefit comes with Windows using the other cores while the game uses the one or two cores/thread it's using.

-Wolf sends

 

[Supernova1138]

Having more cores and threads does help up to a point, and the point of diminishing returns varies from game to game. Older titles made earlier in the decade eg. around 2010-2012 would often rarely scale at all past 2 cores, so having more than 2 cores and 2 threads was only really beneficial for background tasks back then. Some newer titles still running on fairly old engines or lower budget indie games often still don't scale much past 1 or 2 cores. For current AAA titles, a lot are scaling up to 6-8 threads, and the best current gaming CPU, the Core i7 8700k has 6 cores and 12 threads. Going above the highest core and thread count on a mainstream chip eg. the R7 1700/1700x/1800x/2700/2700x, which offer 8 cores and 16 threads is not worthwhile for gaming, as the games don't scale across that many threads, and even if you're increasing the CPU load by livestreaming, there are rapidly diminishing returns going above 8 cores and 16 threads.

 

[d.madnwild123]

Games have to be coded to take advantage of available cores/threads. Otherwise, the only benefit comes with Windows using the other cores while the game uses the one or two cores/thread it's using.

-Wolf sends

Having more cores and threads does help up to a point, and the point of diminishing returns varies from game to game. Older titles made earlier in the decade eg. around 2010-2012 would often rarely scale at all past 2 cores, so having more than 2 cores and 2 threads was only really beneficial for background tasks back then. Some newer titles still running on fairly old engines or lower budget indie games often still don't scale much past 1 or 2 cores. For current AAA titles, a lot are scaling up to 6-8 threads, and the best current gaming CPU, the Core i7 8700k has 6 cores and 12 threads. Going above the highest core and thread count on a mainstream chip eg. the R7 1700/1700x/1800x/2700/2700x, which offer 8 cores and 16 threads is not worthwhile for gaming, as the games don't scale across that many threads, and even if you're increasing the CPU load by livestreaming, there are rapidly diminishing returns going above 8 cores and 16 threads.

1. If you overclocked an i5 8600k and an i7 8700k to lets say 4.8Ghz, the only difference would be on has 6 Threads and the 12. And that will only make a difference to performance if the game is optimized to utilize more then 6 threads, correct?

2. The i7 8600k had 3MB more of cache, will that affect performance gaming wise? or/and is that also to do with if the game is optimized to utilize it?

 

[icraft]

1. If you overclocked an i5 8600k and an i7 8700k to lets say 4.8Ghz, the only difference would be on has 6 Threads and the 12. And that will only make a difference to performance if the game is optimized to utilize more then 6 threads, correct?

2. The i7 8600k had 3MB more of cache, will that affect performance gaming wise? or/and is that also to do with if the game is optimized to utilize it?

1. Kind of. If the game can use exactly 6 cores then having more threads is useful because then Windows and other background processes can run on them. Also, even though it is rare today, some games will run better on a 6 core 6 thread CPU than a 6 core 12 thread CPU because of poor usage of 'real' threads versus 'fake' threads. Even in the worst cases though gaming will usually be no more than a 1% difference between CPUs of the same generation, speed, and full core count.

2. It won't effect performance in any noticeable way. I'm not even aware of any games that specifically like more cache.

On this page you can see in many cases the 8700k only beats the 8600k by 1-2 FPS, but remember the 8700k has a faster clock speed straight from intel. However, in Civ 6 the 8700k gains 4fps over the 8600k, and the much slower (In GHz) Ryzen 1800 nearly matches the 5.0Ghz 8700k. So Civ 6 is very well threaded. Inversely, DOOM seems to run slightly better on previous generation 4 core CPUs. Why? Who knows


All in all, the difference between a hyperthreaded and non hyper threaded CPU today will be basically unnoticable in most games today.