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Your old processor still gives the chest in games, do you know why?

One of the biggest drivers in the world of PC hardware has been the world of PC gaming, being able to play the latest hot title in the best possible conditions meant that we had to buy not just the latest graphics card, but also the CPU, but this phenomenon has changed in recent years. Why are the old Intel and AMD processors still top in games?

If you have been a fan of PC games for years, then you may have noticed that you don’t change processors as much as you used to. Are PC CPUs too good, or have games stagnated technologically? Well, rather, this is a byproduct of the multiplatform nature of the video game industry today.

Outdated consoles bring old processors to life

The fact that PlayStation 4 continues to be a product that two years after the launch of its successor is receiving games is an abnormality never seen in the world of video games. And we would not like to be interpreted as defending Xbox, since we are a PC medium and for us, playing on a computer is the best solution of all and not one of those glorified toy-like shoddy computers.

PS5 PS4 Pro

The fact is that it has flats that it is considered a drag on the Xbox Series S while continuing to put the common minimum on a console like PS4, which imposes the following limitations on games:

  • It has a very poor 8-core CPU, with no multithreading support that is more than 4 times less powerful than the trimmed Zen 2 of current consoles.
  • It uses a hard drive, which is the biggest bottleneck today and causes games not to take advantage of the capacities of SSDs. Which is a huge hypocrisy after selling us the solid state drive bike before the launch of the next generation consoles.

However, not everything is bad or negative, since the fact that games have to be designed for hardware whose processor was already poor 9 years ago is none other than that today we can continue to have processors from several years ago on our PCs and that they continue to give us good performance in games. All due to the fact that the vast majority continue to be developed for hardware that today is a drag.

Intentionally made inferior PC versions

What happens when you have 8 very low power cores? Well, what you do is intelligently divide the work between them so that in this way the system is not saturated at all. Then if you transfer this to the PC where we have configurations of 8, 12 or even 16 execution threads, you end up having games that don’t take advantage of the potential of the most powerful CPUs. Although then we have publishers such as Ubi Soft who do not hesitate to place all the weight of the game on a single core in their computer version.

Far Cry 5 graphics performance

And yes, we are looking at you Ubi Soft with the very poor versions of Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 5 on PC, where all the game code runs on a single core. Which doesn’t make any sense and is made with all the bad slime in the world. Especially since both games run smoothly on the poor CPUs of previous generation consoles, where the code does run multicore.

The games that really require a powerful CPU

Well, they are those that require a powerful processor for their proper functioning and despite the fact that some of them have a console version, the conversion process has been done in reverse. These are titles with a large number of elements in action at the same time that the CPU has to manage as quickly as possible. Games like Civilization VI, the latest installments of Total War Warhammer and Cities Skylines come to mind. You just have to put them to work on the latest generation brown beasts from Intel and AMD to see how the processor is placed at high speeds to carry out all the work.

TRotal War Warhammer

On the other side we have the games that come from the consoles, and it is here that if we look at the CPUs that they recommend having, we will see that they do not exactly recommend the most advanced and newest processors. High, we are not talking about minimum requirements, but recommended, what you are supposed to need for the games to run smoothly. As you can see, the old processors that came out a few years ago are still totally valid for playing the most cutting-edge games.

Qualification Recommended Intel CPU Recommended AMD CPU
cyberpunk 2077 Intel Core i7-4790 AMD Ryzen 3 3200G
Elden Ring Intel Core i7 8700K AMD Ryzen 5 3600X.
god of war Intel Core i7 4770k AMD Ryzen 7 2700
Flight Simulator 2020 Intel Core i5-8400 AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
farcry 6 AMD Ryzen 5 3600X Intel Core i7-7700
Final Fantasy VII Remake Intel Core i7-3770 AMD Ryzen 3 3100
force horizon 5 Intel Core i5-8400 AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
Halo Infinite Intel i7-9700k AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
Spider-Man Remastered Intel Core i5-4670 AMD Ryzen 5 1600
Resident Evil Village Intel Core i7-8700 AMD Ryzen 5 3600

To conclude, all this does not mean that having a new generation processor does not provide extra performance to games. If not, it is nothing more than the verification of the effects of continuing to keep a generation of consoles alive longer than normal and its effects on the world of PC games.

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