Good CPU for RTS gaming?

[Drystoner]

My main genre is strategy/RTS games. I play HOI 4, company of heroes 2, men of war, total war, and age of empires.

In larger battles my CPU reaches 100% and I start to get random frame drops in game. I'm looking for something that would be able to handle 1000 + NPC's on screen without much problems.

With the upcoming company of heroes 3 and men of war 2 it would be a good time to upgrade.

[Raoul]

What cpu do you currently have, how many cores?

[CursedPanther]

A few things need to be clarified first:
1. Are you planning a brand new PC build or just partial upgrade?
2. If partial upgrade, what is your current specs and what else do you need to be replaced?
3. What is your budget?

[Drystoner]

Originally posted by Raoul:

What cpu do you currently have, how many cores?

Currently an i5 8400 as a friend of mine offered to pay a lot for my i5 10400 bundle. At the time I never got to test the 10400, but I'd imagine I'd have seen good results for RTS games with that.

[Drystoner]

Originally posted by CursedPanther:

A few things need to be clarified first:
1. Are you planning a brand new PC build or just partial upgrade?
2. If partial upgrade, what is your current specs and what else do you need to be replaced?
3. What is your budget?

Partial upgrade, I will be keeping the GPU (RTX 2060) and also the case, SSD, and power supply.

Current specs are:
* i5 8400
*RTX 2060
*16GB RAM
*WD BLUE SN550 1TB NVMe

My budget for motherboard and CPU is around £400.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

If you wanna keep your old motherboard (if it's a good board), you can buy i7 8700k. Otherwise, there is no point of buying an older gen cpu when the latest gen can give you more performance and as cheap. Good cpu starts from i5 12400 and goes all the way to i9-12900k. Or Ryzen 5600x to 5800X3D. Choose according to your budget.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

You can get i7-8700K for around £300. Probably need better CPU cooler as well.
Easier then swapping out the motherboard.

[Agent]

Get either an i5 12600 or an i7 12700. Don't bother with Ryzen for strategy gaming unless you get a much better deal with 5000 series.

[A&A]

i7 8700k is useless for games such HOI because it is using every core and the difference in performance is 20% only because it is using HT.

Next cpu should be intel i5 12600KF (not sure which is better with e-cores or enabled AVX512 instruction) or Ryzen 7 5700X or above

Ryzen 5800X3D shouldn't help that much as we saw in city skylines.

[Illusion of Progress]

The best combination of IPC and clock speed, which results in per core performance, would be best, and not just for this genre but this genre is especially demanding on that aspect.

You'd probably want at least six cores if upgrading from a Core i5 8400.

If you're willing to wait, both Intel and AMD have stuff coming later this year, and both of them will (almost surely) be better than whatever is presently available. But it will be expensive and require waiting too.

If you don't want to wait or spend as much, an Intel 12th generation followed by a Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000 series) in that order are you best options. That's ignoring the wild card that is the 5800X3D as it might actually be the best (but it will also be expensive). That's the order "generally speaking".

It's worth researching game to game to see if certain ones you play favor either architecture (for example, certain ones might happen to run comparable or even better on the slightly slower one rather than the faster one).

Basically, try and find benchmarks for those particular games including Core i5 12400/12600K, Core i7 12700K, Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5700X/5800X, and Ryzen 7 5800X3D, and see how each performs. Then factor in cost and make a choice. Those are basically the CPUs to narrow your focus on right now IMO for gaming in general. Above that is only worth it if you need more cores (and new stuff is too close to warrant spending the premium on, and this somewhat goes for the 5800X3D as well), and less (like Core i3/Ryzen 3) is generally too low on core/thread count.

[A&A]

Company of heroes 2, men of war, Total war, age of empires are using between 1 to 6 cores. Only HOI4 can use to 32 cores as l know, but. Hey look at Intel 12600KF, disable the e cores, enable AVX 512, OC it to 5.3GHz and done.

But if you ask me i5 8400 is good enough for these games, expect Hoi4

[Zefar]

Originally posted by A&A:

Company of heroes 2, men of war, Total war, age of empires are using between 1 to 6 cores. Only HOI4 can use to 32 cores as l know, but. Hey look at Intel 12600KF, disable the e cores, enable AVX 512, OC it to 5.3GHz and done.

But if you ask me i5 8400 is good enough for these games, expect Hoi4

The i5 8400 is struggling with total War Warhammer 2. Long end of round times. Battles will be quite demanding pretty quickly.

I know as I've used that CPU on that game and then switched too i7 8700(Non K version) and it did a lot better.

The i5 8400 isn't good for heavy CPU Games. It's good for other games that rely on the graphics card more.

Haven't played the other games on the list but in Total War Warhammer 2 it is struggling.

[A&A]

Ah, Total war warhammer 2

https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/total-war-warhammer-2-pc-performance-analysis/

https://youtu.be/F3shgl8JNxQ
https://youtu.be/TAh_So3e-zA
https://youtu.be/ow91TuNvLwY
https://youtu.be/GhAHke4r72Q

As l said, the difference between i5 8400 and i7 8700 is only the HT, which can give you 10-20% better performance (in multicore) but as you can see even i5 12600K will struggle

This game's optimization is worse than GTA 5! SRSLY? Nooo... SRSLY? Noooo... fk way

[Tomi Montana]

Originally posted by A&A:

Ah, Total war warhammer 2

https://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/total-war-warhammer-2-pc-performance-analysis/

https://youtu.be/F3shgl8JNxQ
https://youtu.be/TAh_So3e-zA
https://youtu.be/ow91TuNvLwY
https://youtu.be/GhAHke4r72Q

As l said, the difference between i5 8400 and i7 8700 is only the HT, which can give you 10-20% better performance (in multicore) but as you can see even i5 12600K will struggle

This game's optimization is worse than GTA 5! SRSLY? Nooo... SRSLY? Noooo... fk way

Yeah, games like these can be quite demanding on CPUs but I would still argue that OP might benefit from a CPU upgrade if their CPU is not up to their standards.
By the way, is that a KQLY reference at the end?

[Zefar]

Okay lets look at one of the videos you linked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3shgl8JNxQ

That is a i5 8600K that is overclocked to 5 GHz. The newer Gen i5 is always higher too.
How is that comparable to the i5 8400 that isn't overclocked?

Now this is as close to my setup that I can find on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeVUa5eQzS0
When I played it a lot with my GTX 1070, I don't have that anymore as I sold it.
But they are playing on Ultra with no problem for most of the round where only at the end it dipped a bit.

I played with i5 8400 for quite some time in Warhammer 2 and when I moved to an i7 8700 the FPS drops went away for most battles and most parts of the map. There are still stuff on the map that just drains the FPS and it's just bugs.
But overall the end turn times was reduced a lot and the entire game felt better. A lot better.
Only the biggest battles with full amount of units seems to actually affect the FPS more than usual but that's about it.

[Agent]

RTS games are very complex, they're probably one of the more difficult games to optimise. More instructions are demanded from the CPU than any other genre. It's really not that far behind simulation.