The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - PC System Requirements are here!

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Assuming the gamestar reports are true about maxing the game out with a 980 and i7 4790 at 1080p 60fps, how would an i5 4690 presumably perform/compare?
 
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Assuming the gamestar reports are true about maxing the game out with a 980 and i7 4790 at 1080p 60fps, how would an i5 4690 presumably perform/compare?


Not much short of it, possibly even with it. We don't know how much advantage the game can take of the extra thread contexts on the i7.

In hyperthreading, if you have more active threads than cores, some of the threads will use the extra thread contexts, and the cores will interleave instructions as the opportunity arises. Without hyperthreading, those threads have to preempt running threads or wait for them to block, then the core has to do a context switch to the new thread.
 
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Assuming the gamestar reports are true about maxing the game out with a 980 and i7 4790 at 1080p 60fps, how would an i5 4690 presumably perform/compare?

I also have 4690 but the K variant which I have overclocked to 4.4 Ghz but that's mainly because I have 980 in SLI but other than that I think i5 4690 is a very competent processor for gaming so my advice is to wait on processor upgrade and get an SSD for now, probably 8 GB of more ram won't hurt as well because it's cheap but that's not really important, SSD on the other hand can make your experience better.

As the game release, check the performance of your i5 and then decide CPU upgrade. I think you don't need it.

NOTE: I saw your old post before you Ninjaed it :D
 
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Haha, I re-read it and thought "Who want's to read all of that!?" the cpu was my biggest concern and I landed on the idea that I should just wait and see how the 4690 does. If I need the extra performance I can get the i7 from Amazon and only have to wait two extra days until it arrives anyway.
 
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the i5 would be a bottleneck for the 980

You have no foundation for that statement.

The purpose of this thread is to make sincere efforts to advise other members who are considering hardware alternatives for this game.

A key question to ask yourself before posting is this, "If I were to spend my money following just this advice, would I actually do so?"
 
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I bought the 4690 knowing it would be powerful enough for a few more years not being a K model (bought it last summer). A simple search online provides many results of people asking if they should get it or an i7 with their high end graphics cards including the 980 and the answers are almost always just go with the i5 because not many games will utilize the hyperthreading and such.

If the Witcher 3 does utilize the extra threads, especially for ultra settings, would it be expected that the i5 then load things in slower or cause stutter/lower fps or what would be good to keep an eye out for to determine if the upgrade is needed?
 
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I bought the 4690 knowing it would be powerful enough for a few more years not being a K model (bought it last summer). A simple search online provides many results of people asking if they should get it or an i7 with their high end graphics cards including the 980 and the answers are almost always just go with the i5 because not many games will utilize the hyperthreading and such.

If the Witcher 3 does utilize the extra threads, especially for ultra settings, would it be expected that the i5 then load things in slower or cause stutter/lower fps or what would be good to keep an eye out for to determine if the upgrade is needed?

Problems would be caused by threads that don't get executed soon enough or that thrash the scheduler. I think any problems would show up first in depressed frame rate and either stutter or delayed texture loads.

OTOH, stutter with high frame rate could be a consequence of a game not playing nice with hyperthreading on an i7. Predictable, adequate performance may give a cleaner result than variable high performance.
 
Problems would be caused by threads that don't get executed soon enough or that thrash the scheduler. I think any problems would show up first in depressed frame rate and either stutter or delayed texture loads.

OTOH, stutter with high frame rate could be a consequence of a game not playing nice with hyperthreading on an i7. Predictable, adequate performance may give a cleaner result than variable high performance.
Hmm, I see. Thanks for the info. This has been the only build I have done and I never payed too much attention to i7's because everywhere I looked most people agreed they weren't worth it for gaming.
 
Btw. How much of a difference there is between i5s and i7s when it comes to running 2 or more GPUs in SLI/CFX?

Just wondering that if you were to build a PC with an i5 and a GTX 980, would adding another one bottleneck your performance in some ways.
 
The 4690 is a powerful CPU, I see no way how it would be a bottleneck in the near future.

It would help to upgrade. A 8350 and a 4690 are about the same. I have a FX-8350 and i'm upgrading to a 4790k. People can max out MGS Ground Zeros at 60fps with a GTX 970. I have a GTX 980 and in some parts the game drops to 50 fps and that's just because of my CPU. My CPU is really holding my GTX 980 down.
 
Btw. How much of a difference there is between i5s and i7s when it comes to running 2 or more GPUs in SLI/CFX?

Just wondering that if you were to build a PC with an i5 and a GTX 980, would adding another one bottleneck your performance in some ways.

SLI has the "feature" that everything has to be sent twice, to each board. Slinging resources between main memory and the PCI-e slots may be where you become limited.

Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, and Haswell Core i5 and i7 are all pretty close, but Sandy Bridge is out because no PCI-e 3.0. This is also a feature where AMD Piledriver FX-8's are competitive. I've figured since the hardware specs came out, that that's why these otherwise slow CPUs made the Recommended level.
 
It would help to upgrade. A 8350 and a 4690 are about the same. I have a FX-8350 and i'm upgrading to a 4790k. People can max out MGS Ground Zeros at 60fps with a GTX 970. I have a GTX 980 and in some parts the game drops to 50 fps and that's just because of my CPU. My CPU is really holding my GTX 980 down.

It's in fact DirectX11 that's holding your CPU (and therefore also the GPU) down. With the advent of DX12, Mantle and Vulkan, the bottleneck will shift even more to the GPU side, although even now the majority of games are limited by the GPU (as long as you don't play sub-1080p with no AA/AF whatsoever).
 
I see here a lot of people do not consider the i5 as a bottleneck. So I thought I'll save them from believing this, spending their money and beeing sad with the purchase.

In fact the i5 is already a bottleneck in games or applications which are really cpu bound.
Proof:
In this video you can see a dude playing AC UNITY in a highly cpu bound area ( there are even more cpu bound areas just to mention).
With hyperthreading enabled cpu threads are on 80-90% and gpu is 96%( very little bottleneck)
with hyperthreading disabled all cpu threads are on 100% and gpu dropped to 80-85%. This can be considered as a big bottleneck. 14% of gpu usage gets bottlenecked( 99-14).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKzJE0Z-XFk

By the way for witcher 3 i don't think either could be a bottleneck.
 
Well there you go, found your problem. That's not exactly a new affair with Ubi games for a while now or Arma for that matter, that doesn't make i5 a bottlenecking CPU, just that it's not the most optimum hardware for certain applications, not 'most' applications. That way any i5 will be beaten by an i7 at encoding videos because encoding is very thread intensive while videogames for the most part rely on single threaded performance.

Far as I know, the easiest way to check CPU bottleneck is to drop resolution, if the framerate improves considerably then it's not a CPU bottleneck, if it stays the same then that's a CPU bottleneck. Watch_Dogs does this, drop resolution but framerate stays the same hence CPU bottleneck. Tested at as low as 800x600.
 
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