The title makes you believe that it has some serious gains over previous gens but nope. I wonder how much Intel paid for this review...
That being said, I'm sure if the average users CPU was substantially beefier developers would take advantage of it, but we have been in a nigh golden age of affordable PC gaming for the last 5 years - you could have anything dating back to Phenom 2 or Nehalem and still be running the latest titles very well as long as you have a beefy OC and a good GPU.
I don't think so. We've had multi-core CPUs for many years and developers haven't been taking advantage of those.
The problem is you generally need the results of step 1 before starting on step 2. Further, using more cores makes each of them slower due to heat and memory bandwidth issues etc.
Anyway it depends on the game, Factorio as an example tried multi core and going from 1 core to 4 gave a 30% speed boost at the cost a lot of additional complexity. In part because the game has basically zero AI load.
That's not remotely true. Does it scale linearly with core count? No, of course not. Similarly games are going to be perfectly playable with what most users have - which is dual & quad core, so scaling past that should expectedly be limited. A game isn't going to take advantage of something nobody has.
But games are absolutely multithreaded and do take advantage of it. There's a reason consoles have 8 cores, and it's not because Sony & Microsoft love to put in hardware that nobody will use.
If it was standard for gaming PCs to have 8 cores as well you'd see games utilizing that.
Eh? The title is "the best gaming CPU you can buy". It seems like the stats back up that assertion. The title is not "throw out your current gaming CPU because this new one is going to blow it away".
Give it a year or two for AMD to solidify Ryzen in the consumer market, and we should see the real playing field emerge.
Further, let's look at some of Mark Walton's other processor review titles:
1. Intel Core i9-7960X review: It beats Threadripper, but for a price
2. AMD Ryzen 3 1300X and 1200: True quad-core CPUs for just $130 and $110
3. Ryzen 5 review: AMD muscles in on Intel’s i5 sweet spot
4. AMD Threadripper 1950X review: Better than Intel in almost every way
5. Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti review: The fastest graphics card, again
If Mark Walton or the editorial staff are being paid by Intel, they're doing a bad job of drinking the kool-aid. I included a GPU review as well, to demonstrate another title that could be labeled as "technically accurate and practically misleading", but that I think is completely fine.
On another related topic, what does the word "best" mean? Some may think that it is the best on price, others may think performance, etc. I do think a more descriptive term could be used in the title, but that doesn't imply that I believe that Ars is a corporate shill working with Intel.
Does that mean the article is influenced by a PR effort on the part of Intel? Not necessarily. (Admittedly I should've clarified that.)
But as a journalist, it is your responsibility to put things into perspective for your audience. If a monopolistic market leader is moving at snail speed while holding the market back, it is your job to make that fact clear for your audience. Don't get them excited about a tiny improvement. Get them disappointed by it. Compare these tiny gains with what could've been if such and such experimental technology was industrialised.
I suppose the enthusiast segment of the market would be receptive to such information, and they'd be less happy with throwing money every year at incremental products and demand something more.