Why are games so cpu dependent?

[BD2003]

I thought I bought this super duper TnL card for a reason.

And now years later, it seems like every game I play is still mostly limited by my CPU, even though at 1900+ I'm not really going too slow.

I mean come on, what kind of system am I going to need to play UT2003 at a rock solid 60fps? Seems like I'm going to need a 4ghz cpu to keep it from bottlenecking.

I mean even take a look at the high quality car demo from 3dmark. Even with the fastest card at the lowest resolution, it still sputters through at a lot of points.

Are games not just taking advantage of TnL enough? Or does the gpu still depend on the cpu for most of its polygon processing still?

 

[Brian48]

Games are much more complex these days. Just having a pretty face doesn't cut it anymore. The video card does the job of drawing the graphics on the screen, but the CPU still has to perform calculations for the IA, movement physics, audio instruction sets, and just about every other aspect of the game.