Core count for gaming is important until it matches to latest console game hard (now 8core, next gen also 8core)

Current consoles are still using low-power CPU microarchitectures, albeit at higher clock speeds than the original PS4 and Xbox One. So it's still pretty easy to match the console CPU power with a modern desktop processor that has fewer CPU cores each providing much higher per-core performance. When the next generation of consoles arrives at the end of the year, the Xbox and PlayStation families will move to a desktop-class microarchitecture with performance per clock that's competitive with retail desktop processors.

It's becoming that way, raw single core performance is becoming less of a bottleneck over time.

I’d be wondering why, though. From my experience, much of what a game engine usually does looks embarrassingly parallel.

It’s parallelized on the GPU, but I/O isn’t really something you can parallelize that much.

Most of the CPU work in games is in making draw calls, which can be parallelized. Interesting that the meme that games are ST bound persists when that hasn’t been the case for several years (see: DX11+ and Vulkan).

The problem is game devs and engine makers don’t spend the effort to parallelize in the main loop everywhere they can.

You can get extra fps by having a faster single thread. Even still, if you had a 6 GHz single core CPU with a contemporary architecture then you would have an abysmal frame rate in a contemporary game. Those cores are used.

>Interesting that the meme that games are ST bound persists when that hasn’t been the case for several years

Except you don't get that it's not a meme, ideally CPU's were expected to scale into the 10-30Ghz range, that never happened because of the end of dennard scaling.

So yes ST performance is paramount, the only reason it's not is because CPU scaling hit a brick wall and because of power and leakage issues, when new materials become available that enable higher frequencies, you will see everything dramatically improve.

So no DX11 and Vulkan will not magically make all games faster, they are optimizations for graphics pipelines.

Most of today's games we're interested in run on 10year old machines just fine. If you think you can't run an i5 2500K /w a modern GPU and run 99% of all games you are clueless.

Most games are targeted at console specs and have held PC gaming back for decades.

There's not much to parallelise about I/O maybe, but many games simulate entire worlds filled with monsters, NPCs and tons of game effects. That sounds like stuff that's easy to parallelise.