If you're referring to userbenchmark, I think you should be weary. For instance, it shows 0% improvement from a 9700K to a 10700K, and only a 4% improvement from a 7700K

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-9700K-vs...

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-7700K-vs...

userbenchmark is garbage. I was checking PassMark's site

Awesome this is now my new benchmark site. Thx!

It only is if you're running low resolution and/or really high refresh rate. Otherwise a top tier GPU is still your limiter.

Yes single threaded perf is still important, but really only if you have top-end GPUs. 8 - 12 threads is where multi-threaded gaming gains seem to wane at bit, which might make sense given last console cycle's architectural optimizations. Once you're at 8 - 12 threads frequency starts becoming more important. Most recent Intel K CPUs can hit 5GHz+. The 10900K is still the best performing gaming CPU out there, and 8086K is still very competitive. Still seems many game engines are optimized for Intel and even with Zen2 having an IPC advantage, it cannot muster high enough frequencies to beat Intel's top gaming CPUs.

Maybe Zen3 will change that though, more IPC gains and possibly higher frequencies. If AMD can put out at 5GHz chip, it would probably demolish Intel's current offerings.

Where do you consider the top-end to start in Nvidia's lineup? I know that gets a bit awkward to answer since we're not far from being able to buy 30xx cards, so probably best to just pretend we don't know about those for this question.

2080 Super / 2080 Ti. Really seems like you need to be pushing the cutting edge to justify a top-end consumer CPU. If you're spending the money on a 2080 Ti class of card, then you should also be spending money on the best CPU to drive it, though when you're at the top-end the money/performance ratio starts getting significantly more biased towards the money side.

Its not just games, firefox with ublock+ and a dark mode plugin are noticeably faster on fast single threaded machines.

I was going to add "and typical PC tasks" but ended up taking it out because everyone's version of typical on a PC is different.

Agreed, it's funny how nearly all discussions about reasons for single threaded perf just focus on games.

> single threaded performance is even still important for games.

I'm looking at you, TF2 & PCSX2.

>TF2

Is Team Fortress 2 really that single-thread bound?

Source 1 does basically everything in one thread and is a ~15 year old D3D9 renderer.

Maybe they meant Titanfall 2.

Does it really matter?