Your old processor still gives the chest in games, do you know why?

If you’ve been a fan of PC games for years, you might have noticed that you don’t change CPUs as much as you used to. Are PC processors too good or have games stagnated technologically? Well, it’s more of a byproduct of the cross-platform nature of the video game industry today.

Outdated consoles bring old processors to life

The fact that the PlayStation 4 continues to be a product that two years after the launch of its successor receives games is an anomaly never seen in the world of video games. And we wouldn’t want to be construed as Xbox advocates, since we’re PC media and for us gaming on a computer is the best bet of all and not one of those shoddy computers glorified as toys.

The thing is, it has caveats that it’s seen as a drag on the Xbox Series S while continuing to put the common minimum on a console like the PS4, which imposes the following limitations on games:

• It has a very mediocre 8-core processor with no multithreading support that is more than 4 times less powerful than the Zen 2 cut from current consoles.
• It uses an HDD, which is the biggest bottleneck today and results in games not taking advantage of the capabilities of SSDs. Which is huge hypocrisy after selling us the solid disc bike before the next-gen consoles launched.

However, not everything is bad or negative, because the fact that games have to be designed for hardware whose processor was already mediocre 9 years ago is nothing other than the fact that today we can continue to have processors from several years ago in our PCs and that they continue to give us good performance in games. This is all because the vast majority continues to be developed for hardware that is a drag today.

Intentionally designed lower PC versions

What happens when you have 8 very low power cores? Well, what you’re doing is intelligently distributing the work between them so that the system isn’t saturated at all. Then if you transfer this to the PC where we have configurations of 8, 12 or even 16 execution threads, you end up with games that do not take advantage of the potential of the most powerful CPUs. Although we then have publishers like Ubi Soft who do not hesitate to place the entire weight of the game on a single heart in their computer version.

And yes, we’re looking at you Ubi Soft with the very bad versions of Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 5 on PC, where all the game code runs on a single core. Which makes no sense and is done with all the bad slime in the world. Especially since both games run smoothly on the mediocre CPUs of previous generation consoles, where the code runs multi-core.

Games that really require a powerful CPU

Well, these are the ones that require a powerful processor for their proper functioning and despite the fact that some of them have a console version, the conversion process has been done in reverse. These are titles with a large number of elements in action at the same time that the CPU must manage as quickly as possible. Games like Civilization VI, the latest episodes of Total War Warhammer, and Cities Skylines come to mind. Just put them to work on the latest generation brown beasts from Intel and AMD to see how the processor is placed at high speeds to do all the work.

On the other side we have the games that come from the consoles, and it is here that if we look at the processors that they recommend to have we will see that they do not exactly recommend the most advanced processors and the more recent. Top, we are not talking about minimum requirements, but recommended, what you are supposed to need for the games to run smoothly. As you can see, the old processors released a few years ago are still totally valid for playing the most advanced games.

To conclude, all this does not mean that having a next-gen processor does not bring additional performance to games. Otherwise, it’s nothing more than checking the effects of continuing to keep a console generation alive longer than normal and its effects on the PC gaming world.