Does quad-core matter for most games?

[Drecca]

I don't really play many games, and certainly not often. But I find myself having to travel for work very often now, so portability becomes a concern.

I want to play WoW or Starcraft 2, Diablo, possibly Overwatch and whatever games come out in the future.

My question is, would the processing speed of a 13 inch i7 be the limiting factor in gaming, assuming an EGPU is being used?

I've read that games like WoW and Starcraft make heavy use of the CPU, which is why I'm asking.

Thanks!

 

[azpekt]

no

gpu is what you should look at, not cpu

 

[mikeo007]

Since you specifically stated you'd be playing with an eGPU, I assume you already know that neither MBP has a gaming GPU. With that in mind, go the games you mentioned, dual vs quad core CPU will have very minimal impact. Wow is the only one of those games that really beats up the CPU, and its not really well optimized for multiple cores anyway.

13" dual core will be fine assuming you're using an eGPU.

 

[scotty588]

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive plays fine at medium to high settings on my MBP 2016 w/ AMD 460.

 

[SoyCapitanSoyCapitan]

It's better to watch YouTube comparisons. There are many videos comparing the configurations you asked. Generally i7s have higher turbo clocks than i5s so regardless of number of cores they will still perform faster.

 

[Pootmatoot]

I don't really play many games, and certainly not often. But I find myself having to travel for work very often now, so portability becomes a concern.

I want to play WoW or Starcraft 2, Diablo, possibly Overwatch and whatever games come out in the future.

My question is, would the processing speed of a 13 inch i7 be the limiting factor in gaming, assuming an EGPU is being used?

I've read that games like WoW and Starcraft make heavy use of the CPU, which is why I'm asking.

Thanks!

Sometimes there's a hard quadcore-only lockout (Dragon Age Inquisition for example) due to needing 4 cores because of how the engine works, but these will often be fooled by dual core with hyperthreading.

Also some games are just plain CPU intensive, regardless of GPU.

 

[Ries]

Depends on the game and API, some anything above 2 cores does nothing. Others 2 cores are crippling the performance a lot.