• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

What's the deal with some games being CPU-dependent and some being GPU dependent?

J

janas19

Platinum Member
Hello again GH people. I had kind of a general question I thought I would put to the members. If this is totally obvious and stupid to ask forgive me, but... Why are some games CPU dependent to run well, and other games GPU dependent? I suppose I'm asking this question from a very limited standpoint - which is to say, just by looking at the 2 games that seems everyone is talking about: Skyrim and Battlefield 3. So perhaps I'm asking a bad question?

I don't know how wide the divergence is between these two games is, in terms of hardware, but it just seems like a bad idea to release your product on a PC, and then require your customer to purchase another product just to play it? Unless they are specifically aiming at a niche market, I suppose. I could understand if all the game developers worked around a specific platform, say like a console system, but right now it seems there's no good rules on PC gaming.

Do you think that further down the road, the need for buying separate video cards will be eliminated, because of Intel working to merge those gpu elements onto a single chip?

Thanks.

Please read and respond to your Private Messages.
admin allisolm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
janas19 said:
Hello again GH people. I had kind of a general question I thought I would put to the members. If this is totally obvious and stupid to ask forgive me, but... Why are some games CPU dependent to run well, and other games GPU dependent?
Click to expand...

Physics/AI vs graphics.

janas19 said:
Do you think that further down the road, the need for buying separate video cards will be eliminated, because of Intel working to merge those gpu elements onto a single chip?
Click to expand...

No, not unless consolization wins out completely. There's just no comparison. When the GPU is discrete you can market by segment -- a GT 240 is not a GTX 580; but if you were to integrate you can only use one level. (And all integrated solutions thus far are below even a GT 240)

Cooling, memory bandwidth... all become a problem for the integrated solution.
 
DominionSeraph said:
Physics/AI vs graphics.



No, not unless consolization wins out completely. There's just no comparison. When the GPU is discrete you can market by segment -- a GT 240 is not a GTX 580; but if you were to integrate you can only use one level. (And all integrated solutions thus far are below even a GT 240)

Cooling, memory bandwidth... all become a problem for the integrated solution.
Click to expand...

"Physics /AI vs Graphics "- That basically answers my question, thanks.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Computer games are just normal computer programs that allow you to play a game. Some computer programs use a lot of memory and little CPU (Firefox) whereas others use a lot of CPU and little memory (Prime95). It all depends on what the program is trying to accomplish and how it goes about doing that.

Games that are focused more on simulating a world and its inhabitants will use more CPU (Skyrim). Others are more focused on displaying really amazing effects (Rage, BF3 singleplayer) and thus depend more on the GPU.
 
RavenSEAL said:
Eh...where have you been the past...20 years? PC gaming has always been like this.
Click to expand...

Well, let's see, first I was in bed, asleep. The next morning I got up and went to the kitchen for breakfast... Wait, you didn't want a literal answer to that question did you. Whomp whomp ...

Well actually, to answer your question , I suppose I've played lots of games but didn't know much about them... Sad.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
mfenn said:
Computer games are just normal computer programs that allow you to play a game. Some computer programs use a lot of memory and little CPU (Firefox) whereas others use a lot of CPU and little memory (Prime95). It all depends on what the program is trying to accomplish and how it goes about doing that.

Games that are focused more on simulating a world and its inhabitants will use more CPU (Skyrim). Others are more focused on displaying really amazing effects (Rage, BF3 singleplayer) and thus depend more on the GPU.
Click to expand...

Damn that's a really good answer! Thanks man! 🙂
 
Last edited by a moderator:
can we stop with the tapatalk spam?

Apparently he's having difficulty with that.
admin allisolm
 
Last edited by a moderator:
mfenn said:
Computer games are just normal computer programs that allow you to play a game. Some computer programs use a lot of memory and little CPU (Firefox) whereas others use a lot of CPU and little memory (Prime95). It all depends on what the program is trying to accomplish and how it goes about doing that.

Games that are focused more on simulating a world and its inhabitants will use more CPU (Skyrim). Others are more focused on displaying really amazing effects (Rage, BF3 singleplayer) and thus depend more on the GPU.
Click to expand...

Just to expand this a little. There are literally an infinite number of ways to do any task in programming. So how much CPU or GPU processing is done in a game is completely dependent on the choices of the programmers of that game.
 
Cogman said:
Just to expand this a little. There are literally an infinite number of ways to do any task in programming. So how much CPU or GPU processing is done in a game is completely dependent on the choices of the programmers of that game.
Click to expand...

I'm confused. I don't know what the difference between a GPU and a CPU is. If I had the time I could probably Google and read up more on it. But in my mind, at least, it appears that both GPUs and CPUs are elementally the same thing - they both use transistors to make calculations.

Sorry, I feel like I'm such a noob, I must make you guys cringe. :/
 
Think about it like this. The CPU is the processor that does mathematical calculations to make things work and the GPU is the video card that displays the pretty things on the screen for you.
 
fastamdman said:
Think about it like this. The CPU is the processor that does mathematical calculations to make things work and the GPU is the video card that displays the pretty things on the screen for you.
Click to expand...

Ok, but... I thought the GPU also did calculations/processes, hence graphical "processing" unit?
 
janas19 said:
I'm confused. I don't know what the difference between a GPU and a CPU is. If I had the time I could probably Google and read up more on it. But in my mind, at least, it appears that both GPUs and CPUs are elementally the same thing - they both use transistors to make calculations.

Sorry, I feel like I'm such a noob, I must make you guys cringe. :/
Click to expand...

Cars and Chainsaws are both made of gas powered engines, that doesn't make them the same thing 😉

First, what the acronym stands for. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit. GPU stands for Graphics Processing unit. Now, it is true, both are capable of doing large amounts of math and both are made of transistors however, the purpose and approach is very different.

CPUs are very good at general processing problems. Their primary function is to digest large amounts of sequential logic. They are good for doing things like implementing the rules of a game or transforming a document into a PDF. These are problems that take a lot of "if x then y" on small portions of data.

GPUs on the other hand are terrible at large amounts of sequential logic. They are nearly the opposite of CPUs as far as approaches goes. They are excellent at doing simple transformations on large amounts of data. For example, lets say you had two tables full of numbers and you wanted to add both together. A GPU will do the adding of each row all at once. A CPU would have to go through each of the rows and do the addition individually (ok, sort of... CPUs can do some things in parallel, just not as well as GPUs).

If, however, you were to do a whole bunch of "if x then y" sort of stuff on GPUs, you would see a huge slowdown in your processing speed. GPUs are terrible for stuff like game logic (well, depending on what logic you are talking about. If you are dealing with tons of independent data, then GPUs aren't terrible).

CPUs came first, then GPUs. GPUs were originally meant purely as "put the data out to the screen" sorts of devices. Then they dealt with 3d data which is by its nature lots of data that has a lot of the same operations performed on it. After a while, someone said "Hey, lets start crunching stuff that doesn't have anything to do with displaying data" and thus the GPGPU was born.
 
Cogman said:
Cars and Chainsaws are both made of gas powered engines, that doesn't make them the same thing 😉

First, what the acronym stands for. CPU stands for Central Processing Unit. GPU stands for Graphics Processing unit. Now, it is true, both are capable of doing large amounts of math and both are made of transistors however, the purpose and approach is very different.

CPUs are very good at general processing problems. Their primary function is to digest large amounts of sequential logic. They are good for doing things like implementing the rules of a game or transforming a document into a PDF. These are problems that take a lot of "if x then y" on small portions of data.

GPUs on the other hand are terrible at large amounts of sequential logic. They are nearly the opposite of CPUs as far as approaches goes. They are excellent at doing simple transformations on large amounts of data. For example, lets say you had two tables full of numbers and you wanted to add both together. A GPU will do the adding of each row all at once. A CPU would have to go through each of the rows and do the addition individually (ok, sort of... CPUs can do some things in parallel, just not as well as GPUs).

If, however, you were to do a whole bunch of "if x then y" sort of stuff on GPUs, you would see a huge slowdown in your processing speed. GPUs are terrible for stuff like game logic (well, depending on what logic you are talking about. If you are dealing with tons of independent data, then GPUs aren't terrible).

CPUs came first, then GPUs. GPUs were originally meant purely as "put the data out to the screen" sorts of devices. Then they dealt with 3d data which is by its nature lots of data that has a lot of the same operations performed on it. After a while, someone said "Hey, lets start crunching stuff that doesn't have anything to do with displaying data" and thus the GPGPU was born.
Click to expand...

Ahhh, I see. I'm actually starting to understand this now. So basically, although they are both processors, a GPU is designed to perform a very specific type of calculation, but it can do those calculations much faster than a CPU could. So a GPU is kind of like an arm-shaped robot on an assembly line, that only does one specific task, but it does it very fast. A humanoid robot with two arms and two legs could also do the task, but it would take much more time since it isn't specialized.

I think I understand it now. Thanks post! Can I give you a +1? 🙂
 
janas19 said:
Ahhh, I see. I'm actually starting to understand this now. So basically, although they are both processors, a GPU is designed to perform a very specific type of calculation, but it can do those calculations much faster than a CPU could. So a GPU is kind of like an arm-shaped robot on an assembly line, that only does one specific task, but it does it very fast. A humanoid robot with two arms and two legs could also do the task, but it would take much more time since it isn't specialized.

I think I understand it now. Thanks post! Can I give you a +1? 🙂
Click to expand...

It isn't quite like that. If anything, the CPU would be the fast part and the GPU the slow part.

Lets say we are talking about a cookie factory. A CPU would be like an incredibly smart robotic arm that can cut individual cookies into any shape needed and then do the dishes and clean the rest of the machinery. A GPU, on the other hand, would look more like this http://youtu.be/-i1oMwNgH2Q?t=1m52s

Now, in terms of raw amounts of cookies put out, the GPU wins, hands down. However, we if needed a whole bunch of different cookies, the CPU robotic arm would win easily. It should also be noted that a CPU can put out a cookie faster than the GPU can put out one row of cookies. However, the GPU is putting out a whole row of cookies.

So, your example is sort of right 🙂.
 
lets settle this with logical sense. So please consider the reaction between ammonia and boron trifluoride
 
probably if the cpu can spew more frames from a simple game/ai/physics engine than the gpu can render then its cpu bound😛 right?
 
System_Mechanic said:
i don't see why both can't be used equally. don't most new consoles games max out both?
Click to expand...

only because they only have one config to develop for...and frankly they don't have much to work with so they are squeezing every last bit of juice out of that machine probably from a starting point of asking more than what can be done and working down from there. how would you force equality anyways, the cpu has to run the game, the physics, the ai before anything gets sent to the gpu. if the gpu is slow and holds the cpu back what extra could the cpu be asked to do?😉
 
Cogman said:
It isn't quite like that. If anything, the CPU would be the fast part and the GPU the slow part.

Lets say we are talking about a cookie factory. A CPU would be like an incredibly smart robotic arm that can cut individual cookies into any shape needed and then do the dishes and clean the rest of the machinery. A GPU, on the other hand, would look more like this http://youtu.be/-i1oMwNgH2Q?t=1m52s

Now, in terms of raw amounts of cookies put out, the GPU wins, hands down. However, we if needed a whole bunch of different cookies, the CPU robotic arm would win easily. It should also be noted that a CPU can put out a cookie faster than the GPU can put out one row of cookies. However, the GPU is putting out a whole row of cookies.

So, your example is sort of right 🙂.
Click to expand...

Damn.

I really want some Oreo cookies right now. Lol.
 
Soooo um, can I request the admin to lock this thread for 4 years until I get s BS in computer science? Then I'll report back.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top