clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:
> Warp schrieb:
> >   The main reason is that the GPU sets the limit, not the CPU. If the CPU
> > gets fast enough, it will just sit idle while the GPU renders a frame.
> > Adding more cores is not going to help that.

> That's only part of the story.

> The other part is "AI", physics sim and stuff like that. If you've maxed 
> out the GPU and have no way to add visual incentives to buy, you can 
> start focusing on making the gameplay more complex.

  Except that you can't. Not really.

  AI and physics is not really something which you can tune up or down
depending on your CPU speed. They are not like graphics: While graphical
quality can be tuned up and down without affecting gameplay in any way,
AI and physics cannot: If you change them, you are effectively changing
the gameplay. Things won't behave in the same way anymore. It might affect
the difficulty of the game (something which might be cool, but not I don't
anyone would be happy with "you can't play this game at hard difficulty
because your CPU is too slow") or even break it completely (eg. if some
physics simulation is too poor, some puzzle might become unsolvable, or
whatever).

  When you create a game, you have to set its AI and physics quality,
and then it will be settled in stone. If the CPU is so fast that it can
calculate them easily for each frame, adding even more cores is not going
to change anything.

  In fact, even if a faster GPU would allow for a higher framerate, that
would still not affect the quality of the AI and physics. It's not like
the CPU would be instructed to calculate more if the framerate goes up
(because, as said, that would change the gameplay). The results will simply
be interpolated more frequently.

  If you were playing a computer chess game, that would be a completely
different story. However, regular computer games are not like that. They
are rather deterministic (ie. what happens doesn't depend on the speed
of your CPU).

  One thing which a faster CPU can be useful for is for calculating additional
visual effects which cannot be calculated by the GPU. In other words, if
your CPU is fast enough, you could turn on certain visual effects (which
require more CPU power to show). OTOH, nowadays more and more of the visual
tasks are submitted to the GPU, so the CPU has less and less to do per frame.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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