For gamers with limited pocket depth, you may want to spend most of your budget on the graphics card. After all, graphics card performance is the most important for playing games. Recently, foreign media compared the game performance of 4 cores vs 16 cores, which should give you a good reference when choosing a processor.
Will the game performance of 4-core vs 16-core CPU with RTX 3080 graphics card be much different?
Japanese media PC Watch recently announced a test report that many players will be concerned about: “Is it okay to choose a very powerful game console with only a graphics card?” The article mentioned that many players said that a “4-core” processor for games is sufficient, but this is not entirely the case. It depends on the image quality of the game you want to run.
They compared two processors, i3-12100F and i9-12900KS. The former has 4 cores and 8 threads. The current price is only NT$3,000~NT$4,000, so it is very popular. The latter has 16 cores and 24 threads, and the power consumption of the two is quite different.
Test platform:
- Intel Z690 motherboard
- 32GB DDR5-4800 memory
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card
- M.2 NVMe SSD
- ATX 1000W power supply
- Windows 11 Pro operating system
The first is the game “Rainbow Six: Siege”. In 1080p quality, the lowest FPS part of the i9-12900KS is about 47% ahead, and the gap can be said to be very large:
2K image quality is relatively close, with the lowest FPS only 10% higher:
There is no difference in 4K, both minimum FPS and average FPS are almost the same:
In the “Final Fantasy XIV” part, in 1080p quality, the average FPS of i9-12900KS is about 20% ahead:
The 2K quality gap is reduced to 10%:
4K image quality is almost the same:
In the 1080p quality of “Cyberpunk 2007”, the average FPS difference is relatively small, about 10%, but the lowest FPS part of the i9-12900KS is nearly 50% higher:
2K image quality also has the lowest FPS, which is more obvious. The i9-12900KS leads by about 20%, and the average FPS is about the same, both around 76 FPS:
The 4K image quality test results are the same as before, the two processors perform the same:
They also test the power consumption. The biggest difference is when running 3DMark, i9-12900KS requires 627W, and i3-12100F consumes 466W:
I will not attach the other two game tests “Far Cry 6” and “Assassin’s Creed: Viking Age” here, and the results are the same as the above ones.For details, you can click here to read the full review article on PC Watch。
Therefore, if your console is really just for playing games and will run 2K or 4K image quality, then you can indeed choose a lower-end processor. However, if it will also do other things, such as paperwork and browser multitasking, we still recommend that the previous levels of the graphics card and processor should not be too different, so that the strength of this console can be fully utilized.
Source: KOCPC Chinese