We all prefer to play games with lightning-fast hardware. In an ideal world, processors and video cards conjure up an infinite number of images per second on your screen. The reality is often different. In this article, we look at gaming performance when using different CPUs in combination with video cards from Intel, Nvidia, and AMD.
We often write that the video card is the most important part of a gaming PC. At the same time, your video card is only as fast as your processor. Here’s the thing: your CPU processes the calculations needed to run a game. Meanwhile, the processor also prepares instructions that the video card must execute to prepare the next image. The CPU tells you what needs to be done, the GPU then builds up that image with all associated elements and desired effects. It differs per manufacturer how these instructions are processed and how the graphical work to be performed is distributed over the processing cores of the GPU.
We regularly do comparison tests to provide an overview of the performance of all available GPUs, such as in our most recent GPU Best Buy Guide. In such tests, we use our fixed GPU test platform, which consists of very fast hardware to achieve maximum performance even with the fastest video cards.
Gaming on a slower processor isn’t ideal, of course, but for various reasons it’s sometimes just not possible to upgrade the CPU, not least because there’s often a lot more to it than just the processor. The beauty of a PC is that you can perform upgrades in phases, and specifically for gaming, the video card is an important and relatively easy to replace component.
Nvidia GeForce, AMD Radeon en Intel Arc
The choice to test with the GeForce RTX 3070, Intel Arc A770 and Radeon RX 6700 XT for this article was not accidental. These three video cards are roughly in the same segment, which makes comparison easier. Moreover, as far as we are concerned, these are more sensible options to provide an older system with more graphics than an even faster video card that often costs disproportionately compared to the other hardware.
With these three video cards, it strongly depends on the benchmark how they perform compared to each other. If we follow 3DMark’s Time Spy synthetic test, the Arc A770 should come in between the RTX 3070 and RX 6700 XT. Our own performance score, a weighted average of ten games tested, shows that the A770 is clearly slower than the RX 6700 XT, which in turn is slightly slower than the RTX 3070. The three cards consume the same amount of power under load.
What if we use slower processors instead of our super fast standard test system? We’ll look at that in this article.
