Are First Person Shooters CPU Intensive?

[ChaseCTech]

Hi everyone,

I am a console gamer that is planning to move to PC and was wondering if FPS like Battlefield 3 and CoD are CPU intensive games. I was wondering this because I don't know if I should choose an Athlon II X3 455, a Phenom II X4 965 (both of which I will overclock), an Intel Pentium G860, or an Intel Core i5-3470. I plan to buy a graphics card LATER ON, so Intel already has an advantage over AMD because of Intel's iGPU. Maybe I could go with an AMD option and get a better graphics card to counter the not-as-good CPU performance, therefore saving money? That also means I have to put a graphics card into my system immediately because of the lack of iGPUs on AMD's options.

I don't have a budget, but the lower the price, the better.

Thanks!

- Chase

 

[jay_nar2012]

FPS are intensive, especially when there are explosions and when there are lots of objects on the screen.

Either the Phenom ii x4 or the i5 will be good.

With the Phenom ii you have more money to spend on a decent card but if you have a lot of money for a CPU and GPU, get the i5.

 

[Brett928S2]

Hi

Yes the cpu is important but the GPU is equally important....for First Person you should be thinking about a card that costs at LEAST half the cost of the whole machine.... so £1000 MACHINE = £500 graphics card.... etc...

All the best Brett

 

[fazers_on_stun]

^ And if you play in a S. Korean internet cafe, for 3-4 days straight, they can be ER-intensive .

 

[horaciopz]

Yes, recent shooters as BF3, Crysis and the next coming MOH Warfighter uses more cores. Actually in multiplayer it can even use 6-8 cores. Also is important high clocks to handle very intensive shooting-explosion scenarios. Your best choice is An I5 3470. It comes with a respectable stock clock, and a turbo boost to help handle those masive loads of action

An I5 stock will perform much better than any phenom ii overclocked and you can forget about CPU for a long time, its quad core, recent tech and will handle everything you throw it. With that CPU will will only care about the GPU.

If money is not a problem, you SHOULD get an I5 3570k and OC to get a better performance on multiplayer games. But remember, your GPU will defenetly give you most of the gaming performance. So if you have a $240 CPU + $150 GPU you will have less FPS than a $180 CPU + $210 GPU....

 

[dscudella]

Modern Warfare 3 is not nearly as hard on hardware as BF3 & Crysis are. Horaciopz said it best IMO, don't skimp on either one, try to keep the CPU & GPU close to each other performance wise.

I just built a budget rig with an SB i3 & a Radeon 6850 and their performance is great in Skyrim (1080 High), World of Warcraft (1080 Ultra) & Diablo 3 (1080 Medium & High) but all those titles only use 2 cores. If I were to play BF3 then I would probably kick myself for not getting an i5-2500K & GTX 660.

 

[gamerk316]

Single Player tends to be more GPU limited. MP is always much more CPU intensive.

 

[ChaseCTech]

Best answer selected by ChaseCTech.

 

[ChaseCTech]

thx yall!