PC Processors

Games use the CPU for physics, artificial intelligence, sound, and calculating world information. With increasing CPU power, developers can start designing better characters with smarter artificial intelligence, as well as incorporate more complex physics into games.

Processor manufacturers Intel and AMD have recently switched from producing single-core processors to multicore processors, and we're still waiting for the software to catch up. The majority of the PC systems out there are still single-core; it'll take a few years before the majority of the installation base becomes multicore.

Upgrading your CPU will improve game performance as well as overall system performance.

Processors for the most part aren't the bottleneck in PC game performance. You'll find that if you already have a processor that offers good performance, upgrading to a CPU with higher clock speeds or additional processing cores won't improve game performance as much as upgrading your video card.

However, that doesn't mean you can go cheap on the CPU. You still need to have a good processor that's powerful enough to run the game. Upgrading from an Intel Pentium 4 to an AMD Phenom or an Intel Core 2 processor will certainly increase frame-rate performance. You don't have to get the top-of-the-line $1,000 CPU if you're upgrading your processor or configuring a new system. A $200-$300 processor will perform almost as well in gaming applications.

Game system requirements will specify baseline CPU speeds and model types.

The processor will become more important in the future when game developers start exploiting multicore processors. Those changes will definitely come because all the major gaming platforms have switched to multicore. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game consoles both use multicore processors, and recent product releases from Intel and AMD indicate that PC processors are going to improve through additional cores rather than increasing clock speeds on a single core.

We can't forget that processors are useful for other applications besides gaming. Faster processors can accelerate computationally intensive tasks such as video encoding, and can improve the overall system feel by speeding up boot times and reducing how long we have to wait for applications to launch. Having multiple cores also increases system resources to improve multitasking performance.

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