What makes the CPU run a game fast?

[tobinho]

Hello Com!

Im already reading some stuff about game engines, but im at a beginner state tho, i want realy try to figure out what it takes for a CPU to provide a reasonable frame rate as a plattform / potential.

Today most graphics cards seem to be good enough to perfom at 1080p with good or better picture quality, like MSAA and AF varies, but its all up to the user and can be manually adjusted per menu or driver.

Is there any kind of hint for customers to indicate that a cpu aside from cores and frequency is capable of handling a 3D game with dx11 well, well enough to get about 60fps? It could be some kind of instruction set, or something else.

For me playing with sliders ingame it turns out that shadows always impact much, lightning can be an issue and particle desity could be overdriven. Is this adressable to directX routines?

Would be kind of you to give some hints where to look at.

Greetings
tobinho

 

[Dominik D]

No idea what you're asking. CPU requirements for software rasterization or rather a simple "what kind of CPU has to be paired with a decent GPU so it's not holding GPU back"?

If the former - there's a thread about it. Different people, different opinions.
If the later - there's no definitive answer as you're oversimplifying the landscape by stating that modern GPUs are capable of X, Y and Z.

Your framerate is a function of how much time you spend rendering your scene and doing everything that's needed for the scene. That means handling streaming, IO, audio, physics/AI and what not. Some of it will be performed on CPU, some can be relegated to GPU. On top of that the CPU time spent in the graphics driver depends heavily on what you're doing and how. What you're doing and how also affects the framerate and top resolution you can work with (the more complex[1] the thing, the more time you'll spend in the GPU rendering it).

So in general: you're asking the wrong question it seems.

[1] and complexity is not one-dimensional: different things happen when you have boatload of textures than when you have lots of geometry than blah blah blah; what I'm trying to say is that stuff's really complex