4K and VR are the future trends. Does the claim that PC gaming CPUs have excess performance still hold true?

"As long as you have a good graphics card, i3 or i7 will be enough."

For PC gamers, graphics cards have always seemed to be more worthy of upgrading than CPUs. From a certain perspective, if the main purpose of using a PC is simply to play games, high-performance top-level CPUs are often in an awkward position of overperformance.

However, just as the Wintel alliance vigorously promoted the joint development of PC software and hardware, the innovation and evolution of PC game production methods and forms have also made it increasingly clear that game software is once again raising the threshold for PC hardware.

With such a momentum, do high-performance CPUs have a chance to make players truly face up to their own abilities?

What role does the CPU play in PC gaming?

CPU is defined as central processing unit. As the name suggests, it handles the calculations required for the software to run. At the gaming level, its job is also the same.

Experienced gamers will always come to the conclusion that RTS games, or real-time strategy games, are more "CPU-intensive" because in this type of game, there are many independent individuals with different operating logics in the same scene, and making these individuals move together requires a lot of CPU computing support.

For example, in the earlier RTS game "Red Alert 2" which was popular all over the world, if you used 1000+ flying soldiers and then selected them, most PCs that were released at the same time as the game would become very laggy. At this time, the player's first reaction would definitely be that the CPU performance was not enough.

On the other hand, in theory, the 3D graphics rendering of games was originally dependent on the CPU, but with the development of PCs and the emergence of graphics cards and discrete graphics cards, the image processor, or GPU, has shared most of the graphics rendering work.

However, it should be recognized that the GPU in a PC gaming environment does not actively draw a 3D scene. All of this requires the game code or graphics engine to send instructions to the GPU through the system's driver layer. The role of issuing instructions here is the CPU.

Some people figuratively compare the GPU to a bull whose strength is getting stronger and stronger, and the CPU to a cowherd. This shows that if you want the "cow" in the case to exert its greatest strength, you will definitely need a "cowherd" with strong enough capabilities.

New directions for PC gaming require more powerful CPUs

There is no doubt that the increase in game configuration requirements has become the main driving force for the current PC hardware upgrade. The several focus points that can be seen in the future of PC games are constantly reminding you that in addition to a good graphics card, the CPU upgrade also needs to keep up with the pace of the times.

Firstly, in order to make the game scenes clearer and more realistic, 4K resolution and more complex modeling and shadow effects, which were originally only seen in game manufacturers' product demonstrations, have become the mainstream demand of PC players nowadays. The range and complexity of scenes that graphics cards need to render have increased, which has put higher requirements on the calculation of CPU running instructions.

I still remember when "Assassin's Creed: Unity" was first released, the need to realize the complex scene of thousands of people on the same screen against the background of Paris, France, put tremendous pressure on the CPU computing of the running device. As a result, when players run the game on game consoles such as PS4/XBOX ONE, not only are the game effects frequently buggy, but the picture smoothness often faces a stuttering situation of only more than 20 frames.

The reason is nothing more than the insufficient computing power of the lower-frequency AMD CPUs equipped in these game consoles. The developer Ubisoft directly blamed the "low-performance next-generation consoles". On the contrary, on the PC platform, if players use a powerful CPU, the "big BUG" phenomenon of "Assassin's Creed: Unity" will be greatly improved. This also indirectly confirms that the hardware concept of "heavy GPU, light CPU" represented by PS4/XBOX ONE is not well considered for the actual performance of large-scale comprehensive games.

In addition, today, the gaming industry has reached another inflection point where new game formats are being introduced. VR and virtual reality technology have exploded the entire technology industry, and the core usage scenario of VR is gaming.

Since HTC Vive and Oculus Rift head-mounted display devices have gradually become known to players, game distribution platforms such as Steam have spared no effort to deliver VR game resources to the outside world. The high requirements of VR games for PC hardware configuration are obvious to all.

The reason why VR games have to set high standards for PCs is that they focus on pursuing higher picture refresh rates, that is, higher frame rates.

To put it simply, in VR games, rendering a still picture may not be complicated, but the frame rate requirement rises sharply from the lowest 30 or 60 frames to 90 or even 120 frames, which requires a reaction speed faster than a normal person. In the same second, the amount of picture calculation increases exponentially, which is similar to making traditional PC game pictures more realistic. The pressure on CPU computing naturally increases exponentially.

Of course, many people will have noticed that at the Oculus Connect Developer Summit not long ago, Oculus drastically lowered the configuration requirements for VR games, requiring an Intel i3 dual-core processor + NVIDIA GTX 960-level graphics card, making the new standard look less "scary."

But what cannot be ignored is that it is still the initial stage of the birth of VR games. The most obvious technical indicator is the newly released Oculus hardware configuration table, which only requires players to have an HDMI 1.3 video streaming interface. You must know that the data transmission rate of the HDMI 1.3 interface is only 10.2Gbps. If the refresh rate of VR games is 120 frames, the maximum resolution only supports 1080P.

Therefore, rather than saying that Oculus has lowered the threshold for VR gaming, it is better to say that Oculus feels that more hardware computing performance is not needed at the moment. However, in the future, VR games will inevitably move towards higher picture resolution and more complex rendering modeling. It can even be boldly predicted that PC users who want to play VR games in 2017 must now prepare a graphics card with sufficient performance and a CPU with sufficient computing power.

The development of PC games will drive continuous CPU upgrades

Frankly speaking, the significance of upgrading PC hardware performance is no longer aimed at ordinary users who work online. On the contrary, it is aimed at those enthusiast PC game players who are constantly pursuing PC performance. It does not only refer to the importance of graphics cards to game graphics rendering. For example, the accelerated arrival of VR games consumes hardware performance. CPU upgrades should be placed in the position of rigid needs.

EA, the American company that owns a series of well-known game masterpieces such as "Need for Speed", "FIFA" and "Battlefield", announced earlier that Frostbite Labs was established under the leadership of the Frostbite development team of its DICE studio to research VR/AR technology.

The employees who left Infinity Ward, the creator of the "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare" series, have taken the lead in establishing a number of game companies. Among them, Reload Studio and The Rogue Initiative have both clearly stated that they want to produce 3A masterpieces for VR.

Another company that must be mentioned is Ubisoft, one of the world's top game developers. It was also one of the first manufacturers to invest in VR game development. As early as the E3 game show in 2016, Ubisoft had already exhibited two of its VR games, "Eagle Flight" and "Star Trek: Bridge Crew".

You never know what the VR games that these game manufacturers are about to launch will be like, just like when people were playing "Super Mario" back then, they would never dare to imagine that "GTA5", which could go to the sky and the earth and was omnipotent, would also become a game now.

Correspondingly, CPUs are also constantly pursuing breakthroughs to meet new demands. Taking Intel CPU products as an example, the Haswell architecture in 2013 greatly optimized cache performance, making gaming performance better than the previous Ivy Bridge architecture; the Skylake processor that debuted in 2015 was not only faster, but also supported the new DDR4 memory; and the new Kaby Lake products that will be fully launched in 2017 have an overall performance improvement of about 12% to 19%. The new 14nm+ process brings a higher main frequency, and the top-level i7-7700K will undoubtedly become the only choice for future enthusiasts.

As for the CPU overperformance? Before the new era of PC gaming, this statement may be a little premature.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.