Your PC’s Processor: The Foundation of Your Gaming PC
Where do you start when shopping for or planning a hardcore gaming machine? The real power behind any high-performance PC depends on the big three: CPU, system memory, and graphics card. These are the foundations of good gaming hardware, and they are hidden in the internal parts of your computer.
As you probably know, your computer’s CPU processes data according to instructions given by a program — in this case, a game or Windows itself — and sends commands and data to various peripheral devices in your system. But why do games require so much on your CPU?
Consider the work involved in running a popular 3D shooter like Crysis 3, as the processor in your gaming PC has to handle all of these work:
Artificial Intelligence: Your computer must react to your movements, calculate the appropriate strategy, and deal with computer players (which are getting more and more complex with each passing year).
Level Control: Your computer must calculate the appearance of both your character and surroundings for your current game level location. In addition, your computer must process the results when your character interacts with their corresponding traps, keys, doors and keys.
Calculations and events: Your computer should calculate the trajectory of the last missile launch, determine if it hit its target, and change target statistics as appropriate.
Multiplayer support: If you are participating in a multiplayer match or online multiplayer world, your computer must send and receive data packets over the network (be it a local area network or the Internet) from other computers and integrate other players into your environment. In today’s games, this might also include voice chatting between players as the fight continues!
Oh, and in the meantime, your Windows PC should still run smoothly, along with any other background tasks you’re using. No wonder your CPU needs its own cooling system! Of course, your graphics card excuses your CPU from the lion’s share of the low-level graphical computations needed for 3D games, but CPU performance still determines the types of games you can play.
(In other words, even the fastest graphics card won’t help you play a game with the computing demands that flood your CPU.) So, when you’re building or buying a new gaming PC from scratch, the processor you choose is huge. important decision.
While shopping, consider the balance between the number of cores (in multi-core processors like AMD FX and Intel i7) and the overall speed of the processor. You need at least a quad-core processor, but there’s usually not much need for additional cores after that in a gaming PC – instead, focus on getting the highest processor speed you can afford with four.
The built-in cache is also important for a player’s CPU because it is the fastest memory available on your computer. It acts as a temporary “waiting room” for data that your CPU will likely need in the near future; Some CPUs also use it to store recently accessed data, so that it can be retrieved again without remounting from the hard drive or system RAM.
The more cache you have, the better. It is also better to use the built-in cache, which is already built into the CPU itself; All current processors provide some amount of onboard cache.