Making the switch from AMD to Intel in the coming weeks. Need help deciding a path.

[Solomon_gunn]

I currently have an AMD FX 6300 overclocked in my computer but it's time for an upgrade. I pretty much have my heart set on the i5 6600k for my gaming PC. I understand that for gaming a 4 core i5 is the better choice because games don't use 8 cores or hyper-threading in the i7 series. So here are my questions and concerns:

- Is there a reason I should shell out more cash for an i7?

- I always here "some" games utilize hyper-threading or "most" games use at most 4 cores. Will upcoming gaming titles in the next 2-5 years be able to use these? Is this a trend? Are these games that I hear about just special cases?

- In all of these benchmarks I see with various tests on i5's vs i7's, the i7's consistently perform better in everything (though marginally in games for the most part). Will I even be able to notice anything different that's not a synthetic benchmark or rendering a model?

- I don't know much about DX12, but will its release have any impact on these decisions?

 

[KKAW]

I currently have an AMD FX 6300 overclocked in my computer but it's time for an upgrade. I pretty much have my heart set on the i5 6600k for my gaming PC. I understand that for gaming a 4 core i5 is the better choice because games don't use 8 cores or hyper-threading in the i7 series. So here are my questions and concerns:

- Is there a reason I should shell out more cash for an i7?

- I always here "some" games utilize hyper-threading or "most" games use at most 4 cores. Will upcoming gaming titles in the next 2-5 years be able to use these? Is this a trend? Are these games that I hear about just special cases?

- In all of these benchmarks I see with various tests on i5's vs i7's, the i7's consistently perform better in everything (though marginally in games for the most part). Will I even be able to notice anything different that's not a synthetic benchmark or rendering a model?

- I don't know much about DX12, but will its release have any impact on these decisions?

No, the i5 6700K does phenomenally for gaming.

Most games in the future will stick with 4 cores, however the number of modern games that utilize the hyper threading will definitely increase. However i would say it's not worth it to get a i7 6700K.

DX 12 will simply make everything more optimised and increasing the performance of everything, it won't really make a difference in your choices.

Get a decent cooler and a good motherboard and overclock that i5 6600K for the best bang for buck!

 

[synphul]

In most games the i5's perform just as well as the i7's. If you're not planning to do a lot of video encoding and other thread intensive tasks the i7 won't offer much benefit over an i5. The i5 2500k is basically the 4690k/6600k counterpart from 5yrs ago and it's still very competitive in current games. On the gpu side of things, just as people think of the gtx 980 being more than enough for a number of years I'm sure people felt the same about the gtx 580 when it was current. That was from 2010, 5yrs ago (looking at the question posed of gaming for the next 2-5yrs).

Fast forward to 2014/2015 and we have games like metro last light, company of heroes, bf4 etc. Here's a comparison.

metro last light (very high @ 1080p)
gtx 580 - 39.4fps
gtx 970 - 76.7fps

company of heroes 2 (max quality @ 1080p)
gtx 580 - 27.3fps
gtx 970 - 58.3fps

I won't bore with each comparison, but bottom line is a lot changes in 4-5yrs. There's no such thing as future proofing a system. Higher spec'd hardware will typically have a longer useful life than budget hardware but it doesn't guarantee anything in such a long time frame (which 4-5yrs is in the tech world).

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1350?vs=1355

What you're hearing is correct, each game is a program and like every other program each is different. Some are cpu heavy, some are gpu heavy, some run on 1-2 main threads, some can run on multiple threads. There's no one size fits all answer. In terms of what will games do in the future, who knows. There might be single threaded games, there may be 36 threaded games for 18 core cpu's with hyperthreading that don't even exist yet. Unlikely, but flip a coin because it's a huge guess. People have been assuming games will use more and more cores for years now and so far it's yet to really materialize.

Dx12 will help improve performance of existing hardware and ease some of the load on more budget cpu's. The thing with requiring so many threads to play a game is excluding a large part of the audience and reducing potential customers if the game doesn't scale well. It wouldn't make much sense with all the people who own athlon x4's, fx 4xxx, core i3's, core i5's etc to alienate all those crowds. If a game company came out and said we're making a game but we only want to make it available to those with i7's, fx 6xxx and fx 8xxx they'd be laughed at and would be killing their own profit potential. Just look at how up in arms people got over games that wouldn't load on dual core machines and that was a fraction of the gaming market. Whether the technology is there or not to suddenly scale all these games up to a massive number of threads it just doesn't make good business sense to really do so unless it's also playable on lesser hardware.