CPU, RAM & VRAM Resources
Processor Utilization
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, based on the Unreal Engine 4, calls for a quad-core Intel CPU or a hexa-core AMD processor at minimum. Based on those specifications, it's fair to assume that the game is optimized for threading. Our six-core Ryzen should be right at home.
We made slight modifications to our CPU charts so that they'd provide even more useful information:
- The first chart illustrates the utilization of each physical and logical core throughout our test. A mostly green bar indicates that the core in question spent most of its time idling, while a mostly red bar tells us the core was active throughout the test.
- The next two charts show CPU usage for the entire test (a little over eight minutes in this case). Utilization of our 12 physical and logical cores is superimposed, with the total height of each bar representing cumulative CPU usage (1200%, or 12 times 100%, being the theoretical maximum). The color of each bar section, from green to red, indicates the load for each core at each point in time.
- The two charts that follow are an enlargement of a 60-second snapshot from the preceding graphs. For PUBG, we're using the 60 seconds following the parachute sequence.
- Finally, the two last graphs represent the frequency of each core during the test.
Whether we're looking at Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or AMD's Radeon RX 580, CPU utilization remained similar through our benchmark sequence. Only three or four cores seem to be used heavily, even though we can see that the engine uses up to seven physical/logical cores at most. Once again, UE4 shows that it's optimized for multi-core CPUs and manages multiple threads well.
System & Video Memory Utilization
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds seems to be more hungry for system RAM when it's running on a Radeon card compared to an Nvidia one. In both cases, though, total memory utilization remains under 6GB. So long as you satisfy the 8GB minimum specification, you'll be fine.
The game similarly uses more of the Radeon RX 580's on-board GDDR5 compared to Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. Still, in both cases, utilization is quite a bit lower than the capacity of both cards.
Multi-Core Performance
Is PUBG still playable if you don't have a six-core CPU with simultaneous multi-threading technology to match our Ryzen 5 1600X? To answer this question, we standardized on our GeForce GTX 1060 6GB card and started testing with multiple core/thread combinations.
Four cores are sufficient to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds with a GeForce GTX 1060 6GB or any other mainstream graphics card. Lowering the core count to two causes a slight performance drop, along with a frame time variance increase. A CPU with two physical cores and some form of multi-threadding should be sufficient, so long as its operating frequency is high enough.
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