Reply to post: Re: Gamers don't need these either

Re: Gamers don't need these either

The Top Ten games NOW, but that'll change pretty soon.

Now, granted, the CPU demands are not that significant going forward, but remember that these CPUs also drive the PCI Express Bus, which in turn is the base for the GPUs, and THIS is where you need the oomph. Plus having more (and newer) memory can't hurt. Oh, and 64-bit will be the baseline going forward. So if your CPU is over five years old, gaming demands will soon put a serious strain on your machine, especially since the auxiliary stuff that support these CPUs will have been dead-ended for several years by now.

According to the specs, new stuff like Fallout 4 and Metal Gear Solid V will need pretty recent stuff to run acceptably, and by that I mean something along the lines of a GT 740 or R7 240. DX11 will be the baseline, and expect this to become 12 once Win X picks up some steam.

My current rig is about six years old and at the time only PCIe 1.0 and DDR2 were available. It's also maxed out at 8GB. Basically, it's about as far as it can go, so I'm about to take a step up, though not to this level. No, just a decently recent i5 with PCIe 3.0 and DDR3 support and the ability to take a middle-of-the-road (in current terms) GPU that should in the end boost each end's performance by a factor of at least 2 (especially considering my current GPU is a 2.0 in a 1.0 slot, so it's actually nerfed). I consider that and the added upgrade headroom worth $350.