Curious. Is an i7 CPU slow compared to a gaming CPU? What CPU is needed for a good gaming machine? I assume that the latest X-Box gaming system plays some of the high end games very well. Does the X-Box have a much faster CPU than the i7. Forgive my gaming ignorance. I pretty much quit playing games after playing all the adventure games on my Radio Shack Model 1 back in the late 70's and early 80's.
The i7 desktop parts are a lot more powerful than the i7 ultrabook parts. The i5s on the desktop are also much better than the i7 ultrabook parts.
The xbox uses an AMD chip, it’s an APU. An APU is the CPU with a good GPU on the same chip. AMD chips don't really stand up to Intel that well, and they used AMD for budgeting reasons (same with Sony and PS4). I know from trying to run BF4 on my SP3 that the xbox processor handles it a lot better.
The best high-end AMD chip you can get is the FX-8350. AMD does produce higher end chips still, but they are ridiculously expensive compared to what they provide - people only buy AMD chips because they are cheaper than Intel. The 8350 is pretty much as high as you would go on AMD - any higher and you buy an i5, and depending on the game, the i5 can be a lot better than the AMD offering. In super-intensive games like Arma 3, an i5 upgrade will double your frame rate over an FX-8350. In some other games, the added power of the i5 won’t make much difference.
The 8350 is years old now - they are so bad at competing with Intel in the desktop space that they have almost given up. AMD no longer designs any desktop CPUs, only APUs like those in the consoles, with much lower CPU performance than an i5. Personally this is quite worrying because in the PC gaming space, Intel has literally no competition these days unless you are doing a budget build, and even then going with AMD is questionable as the Intel integrated graphics continue to get better.
The xbox chip does run games, but the reason you see the games releasing at lower resolutions is due to the CPU. The CPU handles tasks like drawing players and running anti-aliasing on them. In the case of BF4, the xbox can't do this at 1080p so they have to lower the resolution. The GPU I believe is actually almost as good as mine, but the CPU is sub-par at best.
Arma 3 is a military simulation and uses the CPU to simulate everything. A game like this would not run at any acceptable settings on an xbox because the CPU won't keep up. If you want to run this game decently online, you need a good i5 as a minimum - nothing from AMD will run it well.
The i5 is pretty much the king of PC gaming. In some games, the 8350 can keep up but when you are really pushing it, the i5 will take a huge lead with its single-core performance advantage. In desktop gaming, the i7 usually has no advantage over the i5. In some games it gains a small boost from hyperthreading, in other games this causes a small drop in frame rate. Games have not really started to take advantage of hyperthreading yet.
