Will GPU ever be more important than CPU?

[Elwin]

Exactly, 4 cores are being used more and more.

[Nokiaman]

Not really, many games coming out are starting to use that extra power in multi core systems. GTA 4

GTA 4 is only using 3 cores

[rama]

Plus DX11 will also bring better use of multi core cpus as well. As of now, I think that atleast 3 cores are needed to max out all games on the pc games on the market.

All the talk about how games use more cpu cores for tasks like AI and physics is kinda misleading. These games *use* more threads, but that doesn't mean they need a many core cpu to run well. In fact, if you check some benchmarks, 80% of todays games do better on a 3Ghz dualcore than on a 2.4Ghz quadcore.
The detail the media doesn't talk about here is that tasks like the AI are just not so demanding as to need a whole cpu core

[Umino]

Let's pause right there for a minute. Any judgements made from the following analysis will likely be correct, but only for Athlon X2 processors. The X2 had some rather severe design flaws in it's multi-core architecture that tended to have significant impact on it's performance. To get even decent performance from one you needed to make sure to download and install AMD's Dual Core Optimizer, and even then performance was... iffy. Some X2's also had faulty heat/load sensors and would end up cycling between full clock speed and idle clock speeds (~60%) when placed under load.

All of these things are fixed in the Phenom series, in addition to the Phenom having faster execution units and smarter caches (able to push more instructions per cycle, for faster performance at the same clock speed).

That said, the i7 is still clearly superior to the Phenom; but while the gap between the Athlon X2 and the Core2Duo was a deep chasm from which one side could not see the other, the gap between the Phenom and i7 is fairly subtle, once you factor in the Phenom's budget appeal anyway.

if you say so it might be right - i never had a phenom myself nor do i know anyone owning a phenom to confirm or disprove that myself but it sounds just logical to me

anyway - when it comes to emulation it will be always up to the CPU doing all the grunt-work of changing program code wich was written for one kind of hardware to a language another kind of hardware can understand

at least that is my understanding of how emulation works

the CPU has to process the code first and then start telling all the other hardware like GPU, SPU, input- network- and drive-controllers what they have to do

of course the GPU power of the system also matters as soon as it comes to graphically demands - for emulating any 2d-only console or 2d only game on a later console the CPU is about all that counts but even for emulation of PS1 3d games you needed a graphics card wich was able to do way better than the graphics actually displayed

and that is also more than true for PS2 emulation

to emulate something you always need a combination of CPU and GPU wich has MUCH higher specs than the game would need if it would run on that hardware in native mode

for example - most good old PS1 games could also run on a Pentium 1 having a 2-4mb graphics card - IF they were correctly portet to run on x86 CPUs natively

but even with my good old AMD K6 II, 64mb of ram and a 16mb graphics card i didn't manage to emulate PS1 games at decent speeds - while playing the PC versions of much better-looking games like ToCa 2, Quake III and half-life was no big deal

the same now with PS2 games - the PC version of silent hill 4 needs like a 1ghz Pentium III or Athlon and a GeForce 3/4 TI and is more than happy if you got a Pentium 4 or Athlon XP

try running the game with PCSX2 on that machine and see where that gets you ;-)

.. i don't even wanna start to imagine what it would take to emulate a PS3 or Xbox 360 game ;-)

so basically i may say - look at the CPU/GPU requirements of the PC version of a specific game and multiply these by at least 3 or 4 then you might get an idea what the console versions would need if emulated - and if the emulator is working properly

another very important thing to consider - be it games or emulation of such - is the mainboard chipset - so if you are putting a new system together and want to have a powerful CPU and graphics card in it don't try to save money on the mainboard either

if the mainboard sucks then you give away a lot of the power your CPU/GPU combo could practically achieve

for example - i pitted a mid-price mainboard with nvidia chipset against a budget mainboard with via chipset - both having the same CPU / RAM and Graphics card installed

the nvidia system was benchmarking the crap out of the via system

[bkwegoharder]

Not really, many games coming out are starting to use that extra power in multi core systems. GTA 4

GTA 4 is only using 3 cores

Yeah I know, that is still multi core though.

---

Plus DX11 will also bring better use of multi core cpus as well. As of now, I think that atleast 3 cores are needed to max out all games on the pc games on the market.

All the talk about how games use more cpu cores for tasks like AI and physics is kinda misleading. These games *use* more threads, but that doesn't mean they need a many core cpu to run well. In fact, if you check some benchmarks, 80% of todays games do better on a 3Ghz dualcore than on a 2.4Ghz quadcore.
The detail the media doesn't talk about here is that tasks like the AI are just not so demanding as to need a whole cpu core

Actually, GTA 4 and ARMA 2 do need more than a dual core to be maxed. I also never said that AI why games need a lot of cpu.

[dr_thrax]

^ Multi-threaded, not multi-core. There's a big difference. As stated by rama, multi-threaded means there are more than one thread and a multi-core/hyper-threading CPU can efficiently work on x number of threads at a time. Multi-core would mean that you need at least x number of CPU cores to run.

[Air]

Most of the modern uses of multi-core optimization in next-gen games is for what I call "parallel bursting" through large arrays of data. This is where you spend some time setting up a neat array that you can divide into 3 to 6 sections, and then have each section processed in parallel. Drawbacks include:

* Setup cost. Some amount of cycles on the primary core are needed to prep the data for parallel bursting.

* The actual burst time is typically pretty short, and gets shorter as you add more cpu cores.

* If the task being run in parallel requires a lot of ram accesses, it's going to end up bottlenecked against the ram bus anyway (you still benefit, but not by as much -- and as you add more cores, the benefit decreases along a curve).

In the end what happens is this: Say you have some awesome 500,000 particle effects that scale well to multiple cores. On a single core it takes 80% CPU to process it. On dual core it takes about 50% of the CPU overhead. On quad core, about 35%. On 8 cores/threads it takes about 25%. So in going from X2 to X8 your game saw roughly 25-30% increase in FPS. Not bad, but not exactly too encouraging considering a 25-30% overclock of a dual core CPU would yield the same or better overall gain.

(of course quads OC too, tho perhaps not as well typically, but you get my drift)

[diegochiha]

Bositman aka Angel of Crapness can suk my balls, he cant moderate crap and acts all smartass, i bet his one fatguy chocking his "chicken" everyday

what does this guy actually came from?
Anyway i think in the future both gpu and cpu will be important,but as for now the cpu is more important tho.

[Memory Card]

Would Direct Compute benefit PCSX2, Directcompute work on both Nvidia and Ati, they also claim that GPGpu can perform 10 times faster then Intels latest cpus.

[Koji]

10 times faster at certain parallel processes... If GPUs made for 10x better processors, we'd be using them instead of sticking with the x86 architecture.

It's been brought up a few times that there would only be a few very rare occasions where it'd be useful for pcsx2... but I don't remember the specifics of what they were.