I have an i5-6600K which isn't even all that bad, but it's struggling with a bunch of newer games. In fact, it's been struggling with some games for fairly long now because Battlefield 1 became too taxing on my CPU at some point. That game used to work great, but then some update made it more CPU-intensive and it's been that way ever since. From what I've tried, this increased demand on CPU power has certainly carried over into BF5. Even if I play those Battlefields on low settings, they don't run smoothly enough for them to be enjoyable to me.

Anyway, it's not just those two games. I know it's a CPU problem because I've read up on it and seen a bunch of performance tests running the same CPU in some of the games that I've found to be problematic for it.

I can't go for a ridiculously expensive CPU, and I understand that it could be hard to get a decent upgrade in CPU performance over the 6600K in games unless I went for something that's too expensive for me. I just want to run this by you people to find out if there are some sensible options in this situation.

Oh also, I know I'd have to get a new motherboard as well. I thought I'd address this before anyone else does. I'm not new to building my PC, I'm just out of the loop on the latest hardware.

Just out of curiosity, how is your memory and graphics card? Although modern CPU numbers are not intuitive at all to me, yours doesn't sound too bad. Perhaps a memory upgrade/card upgrade would keep you going for awhile. I think I bought this machine around a year and a half ago and I decided to buy prebuilt because I would overbuild if I tried to do it myself. It's got an i7-7700K @ 4.2GHz, which I had to look up in the system properties. It came with an RX480. Not to hijack your thread. I'm interested in the answers as well.

The problem I have with some games playing at a mere 1080p is specifically down to the performance of the CPU. It doesn't matter if I play those games at the lowest settings. Well, it matters a little, but not a whole lot because the CPU is the problem in those games and decreasing the GPU load doesn't do much. Some in-game settings affect the CPU load, of course, but in all the cases that I'm talking about, my CPU just isn't capable enough to run the game well.

Come to think of it, all (or at least most) of the games that I can't run well enough are multiplayer games. Even those Battlefields run fine in single player mode, but the multiplayer demands more from the CPU.

Games are each their own hyper-janky special little snowflakes, so what exactlys going wrong with BF (and what to do about it) isn’t going to be the same as the other games you’re playing. Considering it abruptly got much slower in multiplayer specifically, though, I’d guess it’s because of Skylakes spectre mitigations. Those made Skylake CPUs much slower for any workload that has to deal with the OS itself (like many small I/Os). If game developers designed their code well up front it shouldn’t affect framerates much but 🤷*♂️.

You need to look at benchmarks for the specific games you want to play and make your decision from there. You mentioned before that FL studio is mostly single threaded, so a high end intel is probably still your safest bet for that. But if you play well programmed multithreaded games, you’ll probably get more mileage out of an equivalently priced Ryzen 3 series.

Ryzen 4 is launching this spring too, so depending on your timeframe it might be worth waiting.

I'm hoping for the 18-month treadmill to return since I'm confused by my soon-to-be-4-year-old Intel i7-6700K CPU still having a 150 € price tag around here.

Theres just not that much of a step up in single threaded performance from the 6700k available, fgr. Intels 10-series is essentially the same chip.

Hey that's some excellent input that covers all the bases I would think to care about in this context. Thanks!

As for Spectre, the marked slowdown in BF1 occurred well before any of that Spectre business, I think. I want to say at least a year before that, but I can't remember exactly. I was away from the game for a while, it got updated a couple of times, and I returned to a game that kept stuttering pretty badly on my PC. I wanted to play that game, though, so I looked into what the problem could be and always came back to the answer that had become common on online forums. People were saying the updates had made the game more demanding than this four-cored non-HT CPU could comfortably handle.

Anyway, another example is Destiny 2, which I tried to play more recently, and that also stuttered a lot in some of the PVE missions that I went into. As with Battlefield 1 and 5, lowering the settings didn't really alleviate the problem.