Prey PC Performance Review

CPU Performance – How Many cores/threads does Prey need? 

In the past a lot of our readers have asked us, why don’t you use an Intel i7 7700K for your games testing, often stating that it offers the highest single-threaded CPU performance on the market and that that is the only thing that matters in games. 

To say the least, this is not the case and we have decided to use an Intel i7 6850K for our CPU testing for one simple reason, because it allows us to test a large number of core/thread counts and determine whether or not games benefit from high core/thread counts.   

Below we have tested a large number of potential core/thread counts, using a 2core/4thread count to simulate an Intel i3 CPU, an 4core/4thread CPU to simulate an i5 CPU, a 4core/8thread count to simulate an consumer desktop grade i7 and our i7 6850K’s stock configuration of 6 cores and 12 threads. This will allow us to determine whether or not this game benefits from increased CPU core counts. 

In this testing, we used our GTX 1080 to run Prey at Very High settings at a resolution of 1080p, finding that the game kept increasing in performance when we upped our CPU’s core/thread count. Prey benefited from more CPU cores until we maxed out our CPU at 6 cores and 12 threads, putting to bed the rumour that games would not benefit from more than a 4-core 8-thread CPU.  

However, it must be remembered that even out 2 core 4 thread simulation was able to achieve over 60FPS at all times in out test area, which is no small feat, though the game was nonetheless CPU limited.  

In the future, we would like to conduct AMD CPU performance testing alongside our testing with the i7 6850K. Rest assured that Ryzen VS Intel performance showdowns are planned for future performance reviews, though it will take us time to get all of the required hardware in place.