1: if that was true, then the CPU speed would make no difference in video benchmarks...it has always made a difference over the years.
Of course the CPU speed is relevant! Who says that its not? What I am saying is that something like Prime95 is not a typical software and you will never run your machine under such a load. Just as you would try to drive a car that has been chained to a tree.
2: FF XIV, Sea of Thieves, Starcraft, Diablo III...they all drive my laptop at 100% CPU & GPU. I'm working on a 2011 MacBook Pro & the CPU idles at 10%. What you said would be true for up to date hardware, not with hardware that is already driving a high CPU.
I assure you that they don't. First of all, this "CPU load percentage" is only a way to interpret the load, the CPU doesn't actually work like that. Second, a game doesn't just repeatedly and without stop do number-crunching all the time, like Prime95. A game is a complex piece of software with many components that are in communication with each other, there is always some degree of waiting. CPU waiting on the CPU, GPU waiting on the CPU, GPU waiting on the GPU, CPU waiting on the CPU. This is why you never get actual 100% hardware utilization. Prime95
does (or at least gets very close
), since it just runs a trivial dumb repetitive task using an algorithm that is designed to stress the CPU as much as it can.
And it doesn't really matter how old your hardware is. If you components are slower, there is just more waiting. If your components are newer and faster, there is still a lot of waiting, its just can run things faster overall. And it can very much be there there is much more waiting on a modern machine, for example, if you are running with vsync on (your program will then wait for the refresh time). But in any case, its very far from Prime95.
I'll just give you some trivial evidence. Every MBP throttles heavily during in a stress test. Dell XPS 15" throttles heavily during a stress test. Razer Blade throttles heavily during a stress test. And yet for some reason they can run games just fine. Why? Because a stress test is just that — a stress test. It doesn't represent a real-world scenario.
