- Jun 23, 2001
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http://www.pcworld.com/article/2851...t-to-a-bleak-future-for-budget-pc-gamers.html
I've pointed more than a few people at that G3258 CPU and the Haswell i3s myself, they're pretty powerful chips for their price. Seeing them excluded when they actually outperform some of the multicore AMD chips and some older quad core Intel parts is interesting.
In the past, I've been a proponent of an increase in sysrequirements for games, especially when I see some people complaining that their C2D/XP machines can't run modern games. And I still maintain that philosophy, but a Haswell i3 easily outperforms the older Bloomfield/Lynnfield/Clarkdale/Gulftown skus.
Some of this may just be Ubi's poor job at coding, but it rubs me wrong when the game outright locks out what it thinks is too old. Install, run, and let the user make the call whether their hardware&performance in sufficient.
I'm sure most of us have some older games that autodetect your specs prior to install that utterly fail to detect modern hardware, which then cause it to fail to install. Makes me wonder what will happen a couple years from now when someone goes to play one of these older games, assuming they can even install it at all due to online DRM, and it can't recognize that Cannonlake uarch or GCN 2.1 uarch.
Now, this isnt a complete surprise. Far Cry 4s minimum specifications call out the need for AMD and Intel processors with at least four cores. But in the past, games that claimed to need a quad-core processor have also managed to run on chips with fewer cores, albeit sometimes with a performance hit.
The issue indeed seems to be tied to pure thread availability. Several affected gamers managed to coax Far Cry 4 into working on Core i3 processors with hyperthreading enableddespite the official spec's calling for at least a Core i5-750.
intel pentium g3258 processor
The impact on you at home: If games start to require true quad-core processors, it could put a hurting on gamers with a budget. Most of the gamers reporting problems are using a dual-core Intel Pentium G3258. The chip, lovingly dubbed the Pentium K by gamers for its beastly overclocking capabilities, costs under $75 and is able to punch far above its weight class performance-wise with some tweaking. But its lack of hyperthreading support may doom it to an early grave if top-tier games start requiring four-core hardware.
I've pointed more than a few people at that G3258 CPU and the Haswell i3s myself, they're pretty powerful chips for their price. Seeing them excluded when they actually outperform some of the multicore AMD chips and some older quad core Intel parts is interesting.
In the past, I've been a proponent of an increase in sysrequirements for games, especially when I see some people complaining that their C2D/XP machines can't run modern games. And I still maintain that philosophy, but a Haswell i3 easily outperforms the older Bloomfield/Lynnfield/Clarkdale/Gulftown skus.
Some of this may just be Ubi's poor job at coding, but it rubs me wrong when the game outright locks out what it thinks is too old. Install, run, and let the user make the call whether their hardware&performance in sufficient.
I'm sure most of us have some older games that autodetect your specs prior to install that utterly fail to detect modern hardware, which then cause it to fail to install. Makes me wonder what will happen a couple years from now when someone goes to play one of these older games, assuming they can even install it at all due to online DRM, and it can't recognize that Cannonlake uarch or GCN 2.1 uarch.