Gaming on a Single-Core Processor!

### Playing Modern Games on a Single Core Processor: Is It Possible?

#### Introduction

In today's video, we tackle a simple yet intriguing question: Can modern games be played at a modest resolution using just a single core of a powerful CPU? To find out, I decided to put my Intel i7 6700K processor through an extreme test. I disabled three of its four physical cores and turned off hyper-threading to simulate running the system with a single core. The goal was to isolate the variable of core count and see how modern games perform under such constraints. This is part one of a series, so stay tuned for more experiments in future videos.

#### Thanks to Kyle

First, I want to give a big thank you to my brother Kyle for filming this video. While he’s an amateur filmmaker, he did a great job capturing the action. If you enjoyed his work, make sure to give him some love in the comments below. And hey, Kyle, say hi to everyone!

*“Yo, what's up, everybody? It’s Kyle. Sounds like I just woke up, but it’s actually three in the afternoon here.”*

#### The Experiment: Disabling Cores and Hyper-Threading

For those who might not know, modern CPUs like my i7 6700K have multiple cores and hyper-threading capabilities to handle multitasking and intensive tasks more efficiently. However, most games today are designed to take advantage of two or four cores fully. To test how games scale with fewer cores, I manually disabled three of the four physical cores in my BIOS settings. Hyper-threading was also turned off to simulate a single-core processor.

Here’s what my system looked like after these changes:

- **Active Cores:** 1 (Core 0)

- **Hyper-Threading Disabled**

- **Clock Speed:** 4.4 GHz (Base clock: 100 MHz, Multiplier: 44)

With these settings, I was essentially running a single-core processor at full speed. It was time to see how modern games would fare under such conditions.

#### Benchmarking Games

The first game we tested was *GTA V*. To keep things consistent, I loaded the Los Santos map as usual and kept all graphics settings on max except for anti-aliasing (AA). Here’s what happened:

- The benchmark initially looked strange, with buildings floating in mid-air.

- Frame rates were inconsistent, ranging from decent to abysmal.

- At one point, the game froze completely, rendering it unplayable.

The experience was so poor that I had to call it a “did not finish” (DNF) due to technical issues. However, the frame rate meter showed an average of around 20 FPS when zoomed out far, which dropped significantly as we got closer to objects.

#### City Skylines: A Surprising Performance

Next up was *City Skylines*. I bumped the resolution to max and kept VSync off to test performance without any additional settings changes.

*“I’m actually pleasantly surprised by how well this game is running on a single core,”* I said as we loaded the game.

Here are the key findings:

- At maximum zoom-out, frame rates were around 20 FPS.

- When zooming in closer, performance plummeted to below 10 FPS.

- Despite these issues, *City Skylines* was still playable compared to other games tested.

#### Ashes of the Singularity: A Disaster

Things took a turn for the worse when we tried *Ashes of the Singularity*. The game struggled severely:

- It took over 10 minutes just to load the terrain.

- When it finally started, the frame rate dropped to an abysmal 0.1 FPS, making it completely unplayable.

*“This has got to be some of the worst in-game performance I’ve ever seen,”* I remarked as we watched the game barely register any frames at all.

#### Total War: Warhammer – A Surprising Star

The final test was *Total War: Warhammer*, and this one surprised us. Despite being a CPU-intensive game, it managed to maintain decent frame rates:

- Average FPS: 65.4

- Maximum FPS: 83

- Minimum FPS: 35

*“It’s actually one of the better-performing games we tested today,”* I said, noting that while there was some stuttering, the game remained playable.

#### Observations and Takeaways

After running through these games, a few key observations stood out:

1. **GTA V** and *Ashes of the Singularity* struggled the most, with GTA V being particularly problematic due to rendering artifacts and physics issues.

2. *City Skylines* was surprisingly playable at lower zoom levels, though performance dropped significantly when stressed.

3. *Total War: Warhammer* performed much better than expected, averaging over 60 FPS despite running on a single core.

#### Conclusion and Call to Action

In part one of this experiment, we’ve seen that modern games can still be played on a single-core processor, but performance varies widely depending on the title. While some games like *Total War: Warhammer* held up surprisingly well, others like *Ashes of the Singularity* were nearly unplayable.

If you enjoyed today’s video, make sure to give it a thumbs-up and share your thoughts in the comments below. Let us know which games you’d like to see tested in future parts of this series, including the upcoming Battlefield beta.

And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already! More science and studio experiments are on the way. Thanks for learning with us here at Science Studio!

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This article captures the entire journey of testing modern gaming performance on a single-core processor. Each section mirrors the content of the video transcription, providing an in-depth look at the experiment, results, and conclusions without any summarization or condensation.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's answer a very simple question playing modern games at a modest resolution with a single core a single powerful core at that is it possible i put my i7 6700k through the ringer today disabling three of its four physical cores and hyper threading to simulate a single core processor cache and frequency remained unchanged for the sake of isolating a single variable here and that's core count this is part one of four where we simulate single core gaming experience you'll you'll enjoy this one all right first off i want to thank my brother kyle for filming today he is uh he's an amateur folk so give him give them a little bit of lead way in the comments but uh you can say hi say hi to everybody yo what's up everybody it's kyle he sounds like he just woke up even though it's like three in the afternoon anyway we're gonna run a few experiments here involving cpu cores so we know that most games out today either take advantage of two cores fully or four cores fully so what i want to do is disable cores and disable hyper threading manually within my bios and i'm running a core i7 6700k here and we're gonna see how games scale per core so you can see here we have one two three and then of course all which is four because four physical cores on this i7 here so uh we're going to enable one and of course we have hyper threading disabled this is going to be very interesting i wonder if we're going to see some some just immediate performance cuts just running the operating system up front so uh one active core no hyper threading or running at a frequency of uh 4.4 gigahertz so a base clock frequency of 100 megahertz and a multiplier 44. so uh yep that's it and we'll double check make sure hyper threading disabled active processor cores one so we're gonna run a single core processor folks and uh then run our benchmarks with that so you can see cargo and zoom in right here clocks core zero and that's it there's only one so this is a single core processor right now running at 4.4 gigahertz and uh we're about to run some benchmark let's see if some games have been open i don't even know if some of these games will open up running on one core so these are all of our settings this is the same typical mac settings minus nsaa and gta 5. everything looks good and we don't have any advanced graphics settings activated so yeah let's go ahead and run the benchmarks um okay so our benchmark is acting super super strange what is go what is going on what is that what is it doing there is this part of the benchmark no no it's not wow i have no clue what's going on right now look at that look there's just like things floating in midair like the buildings are gone what is he doing what is he doing you guys are saying this firsthand this is not a you can't just fake this i mean this is the benchmark right obviously you know the benchmark uh fps meter down there oh now things are starting to slowly work their way into the picture here i don't really know if anything's gonna change like it's gonna time itself out because right now there's a jet in the middle of the road but hey we're getting decent frame rates so yeah there's that okay so nothing's changing i think the benchmark is broken on behalf of our single core trying to run this game so uh we're gonna call this one did not finish i think that's uh what do you think kyle that's fair did not finish yeah that's gonna yeah didn't finish okay so next up is uh city skylines hopefully this one doesn't experience any weird uh i don't know glitching out like gta 5 did now i'm going to bump the resolution up to max i'm going to keep vsync off you know this is all maxed out just like it always is the only thing i had different was the resolution because of what i was doing to test this with then we're going to full screen it and yeah i want to keep that okay so we're going to load the los santos map in gta 5 as always for the sake of consistency and let's see let's see what we get well i think it should be okay i don't think we're gonna get very high frame rates but i don't think we should see artifacting like we did in gta 5. come on now come on just keep keep on moving around that circle there we go yeah these these frame rates are terrible so now we're going to zoom all the way in which is when the cpu was stressed the most and uh let's see oh look up top there we're getting about seven frames a second six seven frames a second yeah this is it folks look at that much play many frames if you're gonna play city skylines on a single core stay as zoomed out as far as possible so i can't even benchmark this game for some reason fraps isn't working and i think that has to do with the fact that we're only running a single core here so i can't physically benchmark these so i'm not going to have i don't know they're not going to be the most accurate frame rate graphs that you're about to see but at least you can get an idea of what we're roughly getting up there in the top left around 20 frames per second when zoomed far out and then it just goes into the crapper when you zoom in i mean we're talking below 10 fps um okay so ash's the singularity isn't really doing anything one well zero frames a second you see we're every now and then we're switching frames but it equates to zero frames per second which is obviously not playable i would just say that this one isn't even willing to to start you can't even open this game with a single core running it took about 10 to 12 minutes for the terrainium core loading screen to initialize and you can see we're getting yeah way less than one frame a second it's actually coming out to about well 20 seconds per frame so it's not even fps it's spf seconds per frame this is not a yeah this is not not cool and the final result for ash's 0.1 fps across the board i don't think the fps counter goes any lower than this within the game this has got to be some of the worst in-game performance i have ever seen you know what i'm actually pleasantly surprised by total war warhammer's performance here so we're achieving according to fraps and the game about 60 to 70 fps but you can tell it's very glitchy it's very uh it's it's abruptly stopping and starting again and that's the result of obviously having only one core working but for a game that is very cpu intensive this is actually one of the better uh games that we've benchmarked so let's see final result here average fps 65.4 went up to about 83 and then down to around 35 or so now this does look playable playable on paper but as you can see there was a lot of frame stuttering going on and that could get very annoying very quickly so our results were all over the place and to be honest the games that i thought would struggle the most were the ones that you could actually still play well i mean if 15 frames a second is deemed playable in the case of city skylines gta 5 in particular acted very strange ground textures weren't being processed quick enough and it seemed as though in-game physics were affected as well no one wants to play gta 5 with no surface and thus this one was deemed dnf by the way story mode behaved in a similar fashion so consistent artifacts and render delays now onto city skylines this one surprised me in the sense that even though the game relies heavily on cpu horsepower it still managed to generate shoddy yet albeit playable frame rates while playable in the sense that you could actually do stuff and while our minimums were truly pitiful do expect these numbers to rise significantly when we turn on a second core in part two ashes of the singularity surprise here also shocked me this game took forever to load and the three minute benchmark literally displayed a whopping 16 frames before ending however i can't label this one dnf because the benchmark did finish just you know by the skin of its teeth lastly and again surprisingly total war warhammer managed to keep frames above get this 60 fps on average and above 30 when it came to the minimum stuttering was prevalent but when the cpu was able to keep up the game was more playable than any of the other three tested needless to say when we do start venturing into dual and single core gaming territory the games themselves do behave in very odd ways did you expect these games to react the way they did and what other games would you like to see tested in part two and don't worry the new battlefield beta will be among them the game just wouldn't open with this configuration right here if you enjoyed part one of this series be sure to give this thing a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if you've been upset or if you hate everything about life be sure to click subscribe button if you haven't stay tuned for more science studio studio stuff here in science studio this is science studio thanks for learning with us youlet's answer a very simple question playing modern games at a modest resolution with a single core a single powerful core at that is it possible i put my i7 6700k through the ringer today disabling three of its four physical cores and hyper threading to simulate a single core processor cache and frequency remained unchanged for the sake of isolating a single variable here and that's core count this is part one of four where we simulate single core gaming experience you'll you'll enjoy this one all right first off i want to thank my brother kyle for filming today he is uh he's an amateur folk so give him give them a little bit of lead way in the comments but uh you can say hi say hi to everybody yo what's up everybody it's kyle he sounds like he just woke up even though it's like three in the afternoon anyway we're gonna run a few experiments here involving cpu cores so we know that most games out today either take advantage of two cores fully or four cores fully so what i want to do is disable cores and disable hyper threading manually within my bios and i'm running a core i7 6700k here and we're gonna see how games scale per core so you can see here we have one two three and then of course all which is four because four physical cores on this i7 here so uh we're going to enable one and of course we have hyper threading disabled this is going to be very interesting i wonder if we're going to see some some just immediate performance cuts just running the operating system up front so uh one active core no hyper threading or running at a frequency of uh 4.4 gigahertz so a base clock frequency of 100 megahertz and a multiplier 44. so uh yep that's it and we'll double check make sure hyper threading disabled active processor cores one so we're gonna run a single core processor folks and uh then run our benchmarks with that so you can see cargo and zoom in right here clocks core zero and that's it there's only one so this is a single core processor right now running at 4.4 gigahertz and uh we're about to run some benchmark let's see if some games have been open i don't even know if some of these games will open up running on one core so these are all of our settings this is the same typical mac settings minus nsaa and gta 5. everything looks good and we don't have any advanced graphics settings activated so yeah let's go ahead and run the benchmarks um okay so our benchmark is acting super super strange what is go what is going on what is that what is it doing there is this part of the benchmark no no it's not wow i have no clue what's going on right now look at that look there's just like things floating in midair like the buildings are gone what is he doing what is he doing you guys are saying this firsthand this is not a you can't just fake this i mean this is the benchmark right obviously you know the benchmark uh fps meter down there oh now things are starting to slowly work their way into the picture here i don't really know if anything's gonna change like it's gonna time itself out because right now there's a jet in the middle of the road but hey we're getting decent frame rates so yeah there's that okay so nothing's changing i think the benchmark is broken on behalf of our single core trying to run this game so uh we're gonna call this one did not finish i think that's uh what do you think kyle that's fair did not finish yeah that's gonna yeah didn't finish okay so next up is uh city skylines hopefully this one doesn't experience any weird uh i don't know glitching out like gta 5 did now i'm going to bump the resolution up to max i'm going to keep vsync off you know this is all maxed out just like it always is the only thing i had different was the resolution because of what i was doing to test this with then we're going to full screen it and yeah i want to keep that okay so we're going to load the los santos map in gta 5 as always for the sake of consistency and let's see let's see what we get well i think it should be okay i don't think we're gonna get very high frame rates but i don't think we should see artifacting like we did in gta 5. come on now come on just keep keep on moving around that circle there we go yeah these these frame rates are terrible so now we're going to zoom all the way in which is when the cpu was stressed the most and uh let's see oh look up top there we're getting about seven frames a second six seven frames a second yeah this is it folks look at that much play many frames if you're gonna play city skylines on a single core stay as zoomed out as far as possible so i can't even benchmark this game for some reason fraps isn't working and i think that has to do with the fact that we're only running a single core here so i can't physically benchmark these so i'm not going to have i don't know they're not going to be the most accurate frame rate graphs that you're about to see but at least you can get an idea of what we're roughly getting up there in the top left around 20 frames per second when zoomed far out and then it just goes into the crapper when you zoom in i mean we're talking below 10 fps um okay so ash's the singularity isn't really doing anything one well zero frames a second you see we're every now and then we're switching frames but it equates to zero frames per second which is obviously not playable i would just say that this one isn't even willing to to start you can't even open this game with a single core running it took about 10 to 12 minutes for the terrainium core loading screen to initialize and you can see we're getting yeah way less than one frame a second it's actually coming out to about well 20 seconds per frame so it's not even fps it's spf seconds per frame this is not a yeah this is not not cool and the final result for ash's 0.1 fps across the board i don't think the fps counter goes any lower than this within the game this has got to be some of the worst in-game performance i have ever seen you know what i'm actually pleasantly surprised by total war warhammer's performance here so we're achieving according to fraps and the game about 60 to 70 fps but you can tell it's very glitchy it's very uh it's it's abruptly stopping and starting again and that's the result of obviously having only one core working but for a game that is very cpu intensive this is actually one of the better uh games that we've benchmarked so let's see final result here average fps 65.4 went up to about 83 and then down to around 35 or so now this does look playable playable on paper but as you can see there was a lot of frame stuttering going on and that could get very annoying very quickly so our results were all over the place and to be honest the games that i thought would struggle the most were the ones that you could actually still play well i mean if 15 frames a second is deemed playable in the case of city skylines gta 5 in particular acted very strange ground textures weren't being processed quick enough and it seemed as though in-game physics were affected as well no one wants to play gta 5 with no surface and thus this one was deemed dnf by the way story mode behaved in a similar fashion so consistent artifacts and render delays now onto city skylines this one surprised me in the sense that even though the game relies heavily on cpu horsepower it still managed to generate shoddy yet albeit playable frame rates while playable in the sense that you could actually do stuff and while our minimums were truly pitiful do expect these numbers to rise significantly when we turn on a second core in part two ashes of the singularity surprise here also shocked me this game took forever to load and the three minute benchmark literally displayed a whopping 16 frames before ending however i can't label this one dnf because the benchmark did finish just you know by the skin of its teeth lastly and again surprisingly total war warhammer managed to keep frames above get this 60 fps on average and above 30 when it came to the minimum stuttering was prevalent but when the cpu was able to keep up the game was more playable than any of the other three tested needless to say when we do start venturing into dual and single core gaming territory the games themselves do behave in very odd ways did you expect these games to react the way they did and what other games would you like to see tested in part two and don't worry the new battlefield beta will be among them the game just wouldn't open with this configuration right here if you enjoyed part one of this series be sure to give this thing a thumbs up give it a thumbs down if you've been upset or if you hate everything about life be sure to click subscribe button if you haven't stay tuned for more science studio studio stuff here in science studio this is science studio thanks for learning with us you\n"