Intel: more than eight cores for gaming are not worth it and do not contribute anything

Robert Sole 23 March, 2018

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During a conference at the GDC 2018, Intel has recognized that the performance jump in gaming from six cores to eight cores is minimal and from eight cores onwards, it is zero.

What years ago was a battle to see who launched processors with higher frequencies, now has come in the form of seeing who launches processors with more cores. AMD and Intel are immersed in a certainly absurd battle, which is based on launching video game processors with more and more cores, Intel even sells the Skylake-X processors as gaming processors, something that does not make much sense, since with four cores to play, to dry, left over, if you want to stream, we would admit eight cores as a gaming processor and by chance.

Intel also ensures that eight-core or higher processors are ideal for gaming, since the bottleneck that can occur in the rendering of games is avoided. E require important calculations in a sequential manner and later, be executed in a specific order, so parallel tasks make little sense.

The conference held by Intel and several video game development studios during GDC 2018, has been based on the scalability of the processors. A graph has been shown of how from the eight cores, the improvements are extremely small. The graph shows that from the two to the four cores there is a big jump, from the four to the six there is another big jump, but from the six to the eight cores the jump is almost zero and more than eight cores do not provide improvement.

To use so much core, the game code would have to be divided and the engine would perform differentiated processes, specifically, it would need the rendering, the game logic and the simulation and construction of the work planning separately, but in a way that does not affect to the end result. In terms of experience at the user level, it seeks to enhance the performance of core scaling, without affecting the game.

Hyper-Threading has also been discussed and how it affects performance, since the core is divided into two parts, so to speak, splitting power and resources, in addition to the L1 cache. The problem is that two processes accessing the same cache, we could have problems with increasing work time or what is the same, what is eaten by what is served. If each thread is left for different tasks, performance could be improved, instead of being lost.

This conference would make it clear that, when we have more cores, it does not inherently mean that more performance and better things will go, but that there comes a point, for gaming, that there is a limit, established in the eight cores, since the jump from the six cores to the eight cores is practically nil. In the end, the best processors are the Ryzen 5 and the Core i5 Coffee Lake.