If you’re building a gaming PC, you’ll want to spend a lot of money to buy one of the best graphics cards, but you need to save a few bucks for a CPU that can keep you going. You don’t typically pair a $599 GPU with an $89 CPU. Because the processor slows down the performance.
However, from a scientific point of view, YouTuber and gamer RandomGaminginHD put the new RTX 4070 into their test system alongside a Pentium Gold G7400. The results were surprisingly playable (opens in new tab), mainly thanks to the card’s DLSS3 frame generation capabilities. You can see the details of the output in the video below.
The Pentium Gold G7400 CPU has just 2 physical cores and a total of 4 threads with a base frequency of 3.7 GHz. Currently retailing for $89 in the US, the chip will launch in 2022 and will run in his LGA 1700 socket, the same as Intel’s 12th or 13th Gen Core CPUs. It’s not old, it’s just a bargain.
The RTX 4070, which just launched last week, uses an AD104 GPU with 5,888 GPU Cores, 184 Tensor Cores and a boost clock of 2,475 MHz, along with 12GB of VRAM. Our review of the RTX 4070 pointed out that the card offers excellent ray tracing and AI for a fairly reasonable (by today’s standards) price of $599.
RandomGaminginHD starts the video by showcasing some games that run well on this combination of fast GPU and slow CPU without frame generation. He demoed Forza Horizon 5 running at 1440p ultra, averaging 83 fps and 44 fps 1% lower. Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1440p console quality settings averaged 64 fps, with 35 fps being 1% lower. Many gamers claim that any frame rate above 30 fps is playable, but 60 fps is the bare minimum for a smooth experience.
We tested the RTX 4070 with a Core i9-13900K CPU that ensures no CPU bottlenecks and got much higher numbers. Forza Horizon running 1440p Extreme (higher than Ultra) ran at an average of 118.7 fps, 102 fps was 1% lower. Red Dead Redemption 2 ran at 1440p, max settings averaged 85.6 fps , which was 1% lower at 66 fps.
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However, RandomGaminginHD shows that many games are more CPU dependent, offering an experience that cannot be played on a Pentium CPU. For example, the Kingdom Come Deliverance demo runs at an average of 45 fps, with a minimum of 1% at just 10 fps. That low rate is like a slide show.
Nvidia’s RTX 4000 series GPUs, including the RTX 4070, feature the company’s DLSS 3 (deep learning, super sampling) technology and optical multi-frame generation capabilities that use AI to create additional frames using the card’s tensor cores. It is the first product equipped with All this processing happens on the GPU, so frame generation is useful for CPU-constrained games.
To see how much the difference in frame generation affects a low performance CPU, RandomGaminginHD showed Cyberpunk 2077 playing at 1440p with ray tracing overdrive and low crowds. Without frame generation, the game ran at an average frame rate of 43 fps and was unplayable at 25 fps, which is 1% lower. However, with frame generation turned on, these numbers jumped to an average of 70 fps, and 30 fps was 1% lower.
However, enabling frame generation does not make all games playable. In the video, The Witcher 3 is running at an average of 55 fps, a horrifying 1% of 3 fps even though frame generation is turned on. It’s also important to note that the game itself must support his DLSS 3, and only dozens of them currently do.
So what we learned from RandomGamesinHD’s video is that you can use a low-end Pentium GPU on a medium-end card like the RTX 4070 and play demanding games. This is a highly unlikely situation in the real world unless you have a very low end PC, have enough money to buy a GPU, and decide to delay the CPU upgrade for a few weeks. . However, in general, he should use a better processor, preferably one of the best CPUs for gaming.
