Can we play with just four cores today? In 2020? ?

With the core war between AMD and Intel, many users wonder: Can I play with just four cores today ? And it is that the hardware used to run our video games on PC has been plagued by lawsuits and various fads during the history of the platform.

One of the most recurrent has been the debate around the nuclei necessary to play properly; one that has been perpetuated to this day. The current core war between Intel and AMD has put the question of whether we can play with just four cores the order of the day; this time, by those players who still keep these numbers in their teams. We aspire to answer that question.

Index of contents

The cores and threads of our processor

To understand what we are talking about in this text, it is essential to know what the cores and threads of our processor are; as well as what differentiates both terms so used on this component.

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Cores are the physical processing units of the processor. Those in charge of reading and executing instructions; in addition to being the ones who articulate everything we do on our computer through the processor. As we have dropped, they are physical and take up space within the DIE design of the processor.

The threads have a different meaning. These are logical (rather than physical) cores that the operating system recognizes as independent. These threads are born from efficient parallel computing; that allows to divide the load of two different processes in the same nucleus; each physical core can have two threads (threads) and the technology that enables this is in Intel Hyper Threadding and SMT in AMD.

The cores that we have traditionally needed

Video games have never been a very intensive task in terms of the number of cores is concerned; over the years the graphics card has been the focus of attention in this section.

Computer video games have been influenced by contemporary consoles since the late 1990s if we focus on the technical section; But who has truly shaped the minimum and recommended specifications of the titles on the platform has undoubtedly been the mid-range. Both factors are determining when looking at how many nuclei we have needed in past generations.

With the entry of the core 2 duo in the market. Dual cores became the norm.

Consoles as a whole are still today one of the most widespread gaming platforms; reason for which the video games that are launched to the market usually take into account the capabilities of these when establishing certain technical limitations. The more open spirit and power to which the PC has always had access has placed the platform in a passive position.

Regarding the specifications of the mid-range on PC, the reasons for its effects are logical: video games are a mass product, so when appealing to the PC public, the maximum of this public will be required to have access to the different titles on the market, and what better way to achieve this than adapting the minimum and recommended requirements of new video games to what, at that time, most players will have in their homes.

AMD Ryzen takes action

The processor market during the first half of the decade was dominated by the Intel Core and its marked range of products; These processors dictated the general tone of the PC market at all levels and in all possible applications, including video games.

The mentioned tonic consisted of quad-core processors for the domestic range and 6-8 for the extreme (professional); Due to its immense popularity, most of the games on the market were optimized for the four cores of the domestic range.

The paradigm shift would come from two different fronts from AMD. The first in consoles and its influence; Lounge consoles in this generation were upgraded to eight-core processors and x64 architecture. Games developed for the console are now easier to transfer to a computer and are optimized to take advantage of the resources of the living room platform.

The other piece of the puzzle is Ryzen and its large number of cores. AMD's range of processors enters a market dominated until then by Intel and makes its way in the absence of a forceful response from those of Mountain View.

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Both situations create the perfect breeding ground for the trend of the four nuclei to change. Now we would go on to consider the 6-8 cores as standard in the domestic range, with its corresponding effect on the requirements and optimization of our video games.

The four nuclei today

At this point, it is time to ask the question that opens this text: can we play today with only four nuclei? If we stop to observe the range of current domestic processors, we can verify that only the low-end ones have this number of cores; in some cases even with a greater number of threads to cut distances with its mid and high range brothers.

By this scenario, we could suppose that no, that they fall short for the resources that the current works demand; but it would be naive to ignore the fact that a large part of the PC community still has quad-core processors feeding the innards of their computers; and even more naive to reach any conclusion without carrying out any type of test.

To carry out this test we have relied on the three adventures of Lara Croft in this generation to see how the number of cores that our games need have evolved; every Tomb Raider since 2013 uses Crystal Engine as the base, making it an ideal practice scenario.

Test equipment used:

• Processor: Intel Core i7-8700K RAM Memory: 16GB RAM @ 3200MHz Dual Channel Graphics Card: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti

We have disabled the CPU cores from the BIOS for testing.

The first Tomb Raider (2013) performs well with all four physical cores of past-generation Intel processors; mainly thanks to its good performance by core and the optimization of the title. We can't say the same for the jump to Rise of the Tomb Raider and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, both games released with the six-core processors on the market, where they scale as we increase the number of available cores very noticeably.

A few final words

Although the four cores are far from insufficient to play, the clear change of trend in the mid-range has affected him when it comes to playing. The six cores are the norm and it is easy to check if we observe the minimum and recommended requirements of current video games. Although the four will not be a big problem for us.

More than the number of cores, the most important thing is to have a good IPC. Intel continues to win but AMD with the Ryzen 3600 remains very stuck.

This trend is unlikely to continue to rise; for while AMD continues to introduce processors into the domestic range with an almost absurd number of physical cores , they can do nothing to fight the imminent lack of material space that they will encounter in their current manufacturing process and with the fact that on consoles the eight physical nuclei will continue to reign. What do you think about 4-core CPU in 2020?