Processor improve gaming?

[Aroith]

Hey, I have a simple question how much does a processor effect gaming? I know most of it comes from the gpu, but if i upgraded from a 17 950 to a 17 980 would games like battlefield 4 run faster or is it mainly just gpu to see a difference? or would it really only make a difference to upgrade a cpu if the original is bottlenecking the gpu?

[joppykid]

Only if GPU is getting Bottlenecked. The jump of your particular processor will not make a difference in gaming. I doubt the previous i7 you had was bottlenecking any GPU you might have. So long as you're not being bottlenecked its pretty much all dependant on your GPU.

[Aroith]

i have a gtx 590, so 950 would not bottle neck?

[joppykid]

An Intel i7? No way

[myxomatosii]

iirc processor is for "count" graphics

a monster processor is good for MMOs where tons of players are on screen at the same time

i could be completely wrong so feel free to correct me but i recall hearing this in passing on r/buildapc

i run a i5 3350p (one of tomshardware's budget gaming processor picks for the past 2-3 months)

with a 650ti boost 2gb

i think the processor is the bottleneck in my rig but they are fairly evenly matched. i'm very happy with both.

[r00t]

Things like physics, networking, input, etc. are done by the CPU. So when there are a lot of players on your screen you got a lot of things like movement network packets coming in and physics calculations for them. Nvidia cards with PhysX can offload some of the physics calculations to the GPU (really a separate physics processing unit [PPU]) if the game is optimized correctly. AMD/ATI cards still have to use the CPU for physics calculations. There is still some interaction between the CPU and the GPU and when the CPU is busy doing the other stuff is when you bottleneck.

OP, the two processors rank at 5,662 and 8,789 marks on the high end cpu list (http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html), so the CPU you're looking at is about 1.5x faster. If you're doing a lot of stuff in the background of your game it might be bottlenecking.