Is a Pentium G3258 likely to be a bottleneck in most games

[SteveGrabowski]

Is a Pentium G3258 likely to be a bottleneck in most games when paired with a GTX 970? I know there will be an enormous bottleneck in games like Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3 which are heavily multithreaded, but would this be a stupid combination to play most games released in the last 3-4 years? I have seen benchmarks where CPU light games like Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider perform spectacularly on an overclocked G3258 with really smooth frame times. On the other hand you'll see a billion benchmarks that claim BF4 is great on a G3258 because of average frame rates, though the frame times oscillate like crazy leading to lots of stuttering issues. So for BF4 and Crysis 3 I know the only realistic way to play them smoothly on this CPU would likely be dropping the frame limit down to 30 FPS to give my CPU a chance to feed the graphics card.

I ask because I'm going back and forth on whether to buy an i5 and pair it with an R9 280, or stick with the G3258 I currently have overclocked to 4.4 GHz until I can afford to get an i5 some time next year while getting the graphics card I really want (of course not if my weaker CPU neuters it though), the GTX 970, now. I really need to make the CPU+GPU budget together at a hard $400 or less, so that leaves me plenty of wiggle room if I keep my CPU, though the i5 + R9 280 seems like it's a good combo too for a little more. I'm interested in playing mostly games from 2010 or so until now. Getting a video card is an absolute must since what I have now is maybe on par with the crap integrated HD graphics on the CPU.

If I stick with the G3258 + GTX 970 combo am I completely neutering this graphics card in all but a select few games like Bioshock Infinite, Tomb Raider, and Skyrim that seem to perform really well on an overclocked G3258? What's important to me is smooth gameplay (and thus smooth, relatively constant frame times). Are Crysis 3 and Battlefield 4 the outliers, or more the rule in wanting four physical cores the make good use of a higher end graphics card?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Perhaps another option would be i5 and then buying an R9 280x or GTX 770 used off ebay, so I'll throw that idea in too, though I wonder if the 2GB VRAM on the 770 might not be enough now.

 

[NTMBK]

What sort of games do you aim to play on your PC?

 

[Termie]

It sounds like you definitely have a good handle on this issue. Yes, BF4 and Crysis 3 will run terribly on a G3258, and yes, Bioshock and Tomb Raider will run extremely well.

In your situation, there's absolutely no harm in buying the GTX 970 to play games other than BF4/Crysis 3, and then upgrade the CPU sometime in the future.

For more info, see this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2396415

 

[SteveGrabowski]

What sort of games do you aim to play on your PC?

I'd have to say the games I'm most interested in are

Bioshock Infinite
All Crysis games
Battlefield 3/4
NBA 2k15
COD Modern Warfare 1 & 2
Portal 2
Skyrim
Oblivion
Tomb Raider
Fez (that really looks cool)
Minecraft

This would all be SP campaigns, as I'm not a big MP fan. I realize a lot of these games will play really well on either, and I wonder if a GTX 970 would even offer any improvement over an R9 280 in the lighter games like Portal, Oblivion, Crysis 1 & 2 to compensate for the much worse performance on Crysis 3, Battlefield 4. It seems like G3258+GTX 970 is probably a better combo than i5 + R9 280 for Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider since those look almost completely GPU bound. I'm leaning more towards the i5 + R9 280 or i5 + used R9 280x/GTX 770 case, but I'm just trying to make sure I'm not overreacting to bad performance in a couple of games.

 

[Yuriman]

I'm pretty happy with my combination of a 7850 (R265) and i5. Most AAA games run very well on high settings. It makes sense for me as I don't feel compelled to run "ultra" settings and AA, and video cards depreciate a lot faster than CPUs.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

It sounds like you definitely have a good handle on this issue. Yes, BF4 and Crysis 3 will run terribly on a G3258, and yes, Bioshock and Tomb Raider will run extremely well.

In your situation, there's absolutely no harm in buying the GTX 970 to play games other than BF4/Crysis 3, and then upgrade the CPU sometime in the future.

For more info, see this thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2396415

I have seen a review from Eurogamer.net where they got Crysis 3 playing really smooth (almost constant frametime) on Very High by adaptive V-Sync to 30 FPS on a 4.5 GHz G3258 in combination with only a GTX 750 Ti, so I probably wouldn't be abandoning playing Crysis 3. No idea if you could do similar on Battlefield 4's campaign though. I'm guessing frame rate limit is the only way to make that game playable, as dropping to say 1600x900 wouldn't really do anything to lessen the CPU load, would it?

 

[Yuriman]

I'd have to say the games I'm most interested in are

Bioshock Infinite
All Crysis games
Battlefield 3/4
NBA 2k15
COD Modern Warfare 1 & 2
Portal 2
Skyrim
Oblivion
Tomb Raider
Fez (that really looks cool)
Minecraft

This would all be SP campaigns, as I'm not a big MP fan. I realize a lot of these games will play really well on either, and I wonder if a GTX 970 would even offer any improvement over an R9 280 in the lighter games like Portal, Oblivion, Crysis 1 & 2 to compensate for worse performance on Crysis 3, Battlefield 4. It seems like G3258+GTX 970 is probably a better combo than i5 + R9 280 for Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider since those look almost completely GPU bound. I'm leaning more towards the i5 + R9 280 or i5 + used R9 280x/GTX 770 case, but I'm just trying to make sure I'm not overreacting to bad performance in a couple of games.

I haven't played Tomb Raider, COD or NBA 2K15, but of the rest only Crysis 3 doesn't run smoothly maxed out on my HD7850 (1920x1200, no AA). Skyrim is actually butter smooth even with over 100 graphical mods.

I think a lot of recommendations are pretty excessive, you don't actually need that much to get a good experience in these games.

 

[Enigmoid]

Yes the platform is very imbalanced.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I'm pretty happy with my combination of a 7850 (R265) and i5. Most AAA games run very well on high settings. It makes sense for me as I don't feel compelled to run "ultra" settings and AA, and video cards depreciate a lot faster than CPUs.

Yeah, that's definitely a factor. Amazing that some of the old i7s from 5 years ago are still sufficient for recommended specs in many games. I don't expect Skylake to start introducing hexacores and octacores into their non-enthusiast lines (what a kick in the nuts that would be to people who paid through the nose for Haswell-E), so I'm pretty confident I'll end up buying an i5 Haswell next year if I stick with the G3258, or an i5 Haswell within the next month or so if I don't.

 

[Phynaz]

You'll be fine for most games. The couple that you may be CPU limited at you can use the left over GPU power to crank up the filtering and antialiasing.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I haven't played Tomb Raider, COD or NBA 2K15, but of the rest only Crysis 3 doesn't run smoothly maxed out on my HD7850 (1920x1200, no AA). Skyrim is actually butter smooth even with over 100 graphical mods.

I think a lot of recommendations are pretty excessive, you don't actually need that much to get a good experience in these games.

Can you lock to 60 FPS on Skyrim with that card? That has 2 GB of VRAM, correct?

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Yes the platform is very imbalanced.

Indeed it would be, but with the killer single and dual core performance G3258 offers when overclocked I wonder if there are enough games currently written for quad core to justify going to a lower clock rate and lower GPU.

 

[Yuriman]

Can you lock to 60 FPS on Skyrim with that card? That has 2 GB of VRAM, correct?

Yeah, and it's only about half of an R280's performance. Skyrim was built to run on the old consoles.

Not that I'm recommending a 7850 specifically, when you can get 280's for so little these days. It's not be a bad idea to get a more powerful card, but they're not necessary to have a good experience.

 

[Termie]

Let me put it to the OP another way.

Most of the games you listed require neither a high-end GPU nor a powerful CPU. The ones that are demanding will be demanding of both the CPU and GPU. It seems you want to upgrade right now (actually, it's not clear that you currently have a GPU). Given that the 970 is basically impossible to find anywhere, and the 280X can be had easily for $220AR with three free games, just go for the 280X, and use the $180 left over in your budget to buy an i5-4460 or i5-4590. It will be a better overall system.

Yes, the 970 is about 40% faster than a 280X, but in some games, a 3.2GHz quad-core will be nearly twice as fast as an OC'd 3258.

 

[Enigmoid]

Let me put it to the OP another way.

Most of the games you listed require neither a high-end GPU nor a powerful CPU. The ones that are demanding will be demanding of both the CPU and GPU. It seems you want to upgrade right now (actually, it's not clear that you currently have a GPU). Given that the 970 is basically impossible to find anywhere, and the 280X can be had easily for $220AR with three free games, just go for the 280X, and use the $180 left over in your budget to buy an i5-4460 or i5-4590. It will be a better overall system.

Yes, the 970 is about 40% faster than a 280X, but in some games, a 3.2GHz quad-core will be nearly twice as fast as an OC'd 3258.

I concur.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Let me put it to the OP another way.

Most of the games you listed require neither a high-end GPU nor a powerful CPU. The ones that are demanding will be demanding of both the CPU and GPU. It seems you want to upgrade right now (actually, it's not clear that you currently have a GPU). Given that the 970 is basically impossible to find anywhere, and the 280X can be had easily for $220AR with three free games, just go for the 280X, and use the $180 left over in your budget to buy an i5-4460 or i5-4590. It will be a better overall system.

Yes, the 970 is about 40% faster than a 280X, but in some games, a 3.2GHz quad-core will be nearly twice as fast as an OC'd 3258.

That's kind of what I'm leaning towards too, though the used prices on the R9 280x's are pretty intriguing since so many people bought them for mining and are looking to eject now. Considering I got the CPU and my H81 board for $75 total, I figure I'd break even selling that CPU for even $20, which I figure I could pretty easily do on ebay in the worst case. I think I'll be looking to buy on Black Friday with the hopes of getting a crazy deal on an R9 280, R9 280x, GTX 760, or GTX 770 since everyone's going to be throwing money at the GTX 970s. Arggh, I wish Nvidia would have released the 960's this month like originally rumored considering how impressive Maxwell has been in the 750 Ti, 970, and 980.

I was originally really tempted by the Xeon E3-1331v3 @ $250 also for the HT, but it seems like HT isn't that great a performance boost outside Crysis 3. So I think I'll pass on that.

I'm leaning away from the i5-4690k too, since I doubt I could do nearly as well on the overclock on an H81 board limited to 1.2V vcore. Plus I'm not sure I really want to pay for a Z97 board when I have no intention of ever using SLI/Crossfire (why buy a huge PSU and a second old card once the first one gets so outdated you want to replace it?)

So it seems like the only games that could run with low frametime variance on G3258 and really push a 970 effectively would be Bioshock Infinite and Tomb Raider the more I research. I mean those are two of the top games I want to play (Bioshock Infinite is actually my #1 period), but probably wiser to go a little lower end on the GPU (e.g, R9 280, 280x, GTX 760, 770) and possibly revisit a higher end GPU in a couple of years.

 

[Termie]

Don't count on either the 280 or 770 being available on black Friday. Both are discontinued and are already priced to sell out.

 

[SPBHM]

Crysis 3 and BF4 with the g3258 can be a problem even with low end GPUs, it doesn't mean you can't play the games OK, I think this article was interesting in how it shows if you compromise the experience with a 30fps lock you can get smooth gameplay with a lower end CPU, but without the lock even a GTX 760 suffered with the lower framerate and stutters caused by the g3258.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-pentium-g3258-review

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Crysis 3 and BF4 with the g3258 can be a problem even with low end GPUs, it doesn't mean you can't play the games OK, I think this article was interesting in how it shows if you compromise the experience with a 30fps lock you can get smooth gameplay with a lower end CPU, but without the lock even a GTX 760 suffered with the lower framerate and stutters caused by the g3258.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2014-pentium-g3258-review

I saw that. It seemed to play really smooth on the 750 Ti except in a couple of areas with that adaptive V-Sync to 30 FPS.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Don't count on either the 280 or 770 being available on black Friday. Both are discontinued and are already priced to sell out.

That's definitely a risk in waiting; hopefully they're not sold out and there will be places looking to dump remaining stock on Black Friday. If I have to step down to R9 270x or GTX 760 to get a crazy Black Friday deal that's not a biggie, and if I don't find anything a backup plan is to buy a used R9 280x off ebay. Doesn't seem like there is any shortage of them for sale with a couple of years of remaining warranties. I know nothing short of a GTX 970 is giving me 60 FPS locked in Crysis 3 on High anyways, so I'm going to look for crazy deals.

 

[Charlie98]

I've been fooling with MW1/2/Black Ops on my DESK3 (in sig below) with a G3220 and my old GTX560Ti 448... it gives pretty reasonable play, as well as lesser games like FSX & X-Plane. I haven't tried BF3 or 4 (SP only, I don't do MP) yet, but I expect it to be worse than MW, so I haven't really gone there. The OC'ability of the G3258 is nice, but I still wouldn't expect it to perform like an i5.

I replaced the GTX560Ti in my main i5 rig with a GTX760... expecting a significant bump in performance. I won't say I was disappointed... but it wasn't what I had hoped. Spend the money on the GPU (assuming you have your CPU already) and upgrade the CPU later. I would not waste my time on an intermediate step like a GTX750. If you don't have your CPU yet, go with the i5 and wait out the upgrade on the GPU.

 

[escrow4]

I've never supported the idea of getting a CPU and then upgrading it. If you ever want to play modern titles you will need an i5. It isn't optional. And you won't save money by upgrading later as Intel doesn't drop prices. I'd compromise and get an i5 4690 non K and an H97 board with the best GPU you can afford with whatever is left.

 

[BSim500]

Given that the 970 is basically impossible to find anywhere, and the 280X can be had easily for $220AR with three free games, just go for the 280X, and use the $180 left over in your budget to buy an i5-4460 or i5-4590. It will be a better overall system.

If OP lives near a Microcentre, the i5-4590 is $160 right now.

 

[NTMBK]

Oh if you only play BF4 in single player, you might be fine- it's the multiplayer where you really need high thread counts. I say go for it and get the 970. It might not be completely optimal right now, but it'll still be damn fast, and you can upgrade to the i5 next year anyway.

Enjoy your 970 :thumbsup: