I believe this discussed many times already. i3 is actually powerful enough to handle mostly game at 1080p, if you pair with powerful gtx card.

if you compare same latest gen i3/i5/i7 i believe the fps will not differ very much unless the game is super heavy cpu usage

if upgrade from old procc to new, it's really hard to tell. I think best way to know whether it bottleneck or not, is to search google.

last time i oso know my cpu bottleneck by searching google. i see ppl dota 2 can get 100-120fps, while my 280x pair with phenom ii x3 710 just around 60fps, when upgraded to i3-4160 fps just around 80 (well although bottleneck but still 80fps is good enough as screen refresh rate just 60hz). so i know both my amd and i3 oso bottleneck my gpu performance.

now i upgraded to i7-4790k, no more bottleneck
btw 1080 so powerful, the graphic score is 3x of my 280x

My result with 2c/2t


with 4c/8t


another run with 4c/8t


Like totally random in my case.

Intel CPU improvement for the past 5 years has been lackluster. The i5 is going stagnant while the i7 is getting more core counts. Thanks to AMD for not having any competition.

svfnAcid_RuleZzSomeonesimCyrusWong All this while, its a generally accepted that you don't need more than 4 cores to run games, and generally prefers faster cores that more cores. Which is true for games we have to date runs on. Many benchmark confirmed this. Games run as fast on the i7-6700K 4-core as it is on 8-core i7-5960X. I don't know if that game engine limitation, or is it DX11 limitation. But as some of you guys pointed out already some reviews showed that with the new gen GPUs, games built for on DX11 already showed sign of CPU bottleneck (like video below showing GTX1070 is underutilized with i5-4960K). Correct me if i'm wrong, my understanding too is that at 1080P, games are more CPU bound than GPU bound (at least with current powerful GPUs)



One of the supposed advantage of DX12 is better utilization of multi-core/ multi-thread CPU. Since Time Spy was design to bench DX12, I thought I'll test  to see what the impact would be, in addition to running 4K res. Looks like it does use all the available cores (too bad I sold my Xeon 8 core, otherwise would be interesting to test that too).

Obviously Time Spy bench can't be used as the indication of gaming experience, at least not now. But it would be interesting to know, what if future game DX12 game are developed to utilize all available cores on the CPU, from 2 cores right up to Xeon 10-12 cores, in addition to using a powerful GPU. Will we have a case of CPU/ GPU bottleneck?

If future games do use more than 4 cores, means my i7-4930K could potential still has a lot to offer for years to come. If games remains preferring faster cores or better IPC, than upgrades means having to balance between gaming performance and CPU-core intensive apps (like video editing). But if future games can utilize more than 6 cores, then I'll be saving money to go for the Xeon E5-2987W CPU

Demonic WrathYour explanation is plausible too. If I'm free, maybe I run the same 2/ 4 /6 Core test using the 3DMark API Overhead test. That gives the number of drawcalls and fps for both DX11 and DX12. See if the GPU CPU utilization exhibits the same behavior in the monitoring graphs.