The results of the latest Steam Hardware Survey are out, and here's the situation in the CPU space.
A AMD Ryzen procesor seen in a Motherboard during the last day of the SOFA (Salon del Ocio y la Fantasia) 2021, a fair aimed to the geek audience in Colombia that mixes Cosplay, gaming, superhero and movie fans from across Colombia, in Bogota, Colombia on October 18, 2021.
According to TechRadar, it seems like six-core CPUs are the most popular among PC gamers all over the world. Around 34.22 percent of all Steam users have at least a hexa-core CPU, with the second placer being quad-core CPUs at 33.74 percent. In third place lies eight-core CPU users, who comprise 17.72 percent of Steam's current user base.
The numbers for hexa-core CPUs are up 1.19 percent since February and is the highest it's ever been since November of last year. Back then, quad-core CPUs from Intel and AMD dominated the Steam user base at a massive 36.39 percent, while hexa-core CPUs were at far second with 31.98 percent market share.
Since then, the popularity of six cores has increased until March, where it sits in first place today. The only core configurations aside from quad-cores that didn't grow as much are dual-cores (down 0.74 percent to just 10.47 percent market share, and weird configs like three cores (down 0.01 percent to 0.53 percent) and five cores, whose market share remains at a paltry 0.02 percent.
Does This Mean That Hexa-Cores Are The Best For PC Gaming In 2022?
It certainly does, but only to a certain point. Don't forget that quad-core CPUs are still in close second to hexa-cores in the latest Steam Hardware Survey. This means that even though they've been relegated to a lower spot, quad-core chips are still capable gaming-wise-though not all of them.
Last year, the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips posted a video examining how four-core chips from Intel or AMD are faring in terms of PC gaming. Their conclusion was simple: you don't have to buy the latest and greatest chips coming out, because quad-cores are still pretty compelling value for the money:
However, their video did make it clear that playing modern games will require at the very least four cores and eight threads. This includes Intel's older i7 chips, or AMD's modern Ryzen 3s, which all have four cores and eight threads each. That's because a mere four cores and four threads, like those from old Intel Core i5 CPUs, are starting to show their age in newer games:
More Games Are Taking Advantage Of Extra Cores
GamingScan concludes that if you want to play modern games (i.e. ones that have been released during the last three years or so), six cores is the optimal configuration. That's it. The main reason is that newer games are demanding even more graphical power from GPUs, which can only be squeezed if you have a powerful enough CPU.
Pairing a weak, four-core/four-thread CPU with a modern graphics card, say an NVIDIA RTX 3070, will "bottleneck" the GPU's performance. For the unaware, a bottleneck means that the CPU is holding the GPU back from working at its very best, because it spends most of the time trying to keep up with the graphics card's power.
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Written by RJ Pierce
