How many Cores are Neccesary to play games on high settings?

lnav83 said:

Some games really do benefit from multicore processors, like Battlefield 3, especially in multiplayer. This is a great article on the subject of gaming CPU's... I think it's exactly what you're looking for: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: August 2012

EVEN SO, 8 cores is waaaaaaayyyyy too many.

Mintos45 said:

lnav83 said:

Some games really do benefit from multicore processors, like Battlefield 3, especially in multiplayer. This is a great article on the subject of gaming CPU's... I think it's exactly what you're looking for: Best Gaming CPUs For The Money: August 2012

EVEN SO, 8 cores is waaaaaaayyyyy too many.

I was simply saying that some games are more demanding CPU wise than others.

In my opinion, most games that I have encountered only use 1 to 2 cores effectively. I have seen some games seem to use more than 2 cores, but usually with those games that use more than 2 cores only utilize 2 cores at above 70% CPU. The rest of the cores/threads are only below 30% CPU. For gaming, a highly clocked dual core (more frequency) will perform better than a lower clocked quad core. This may change in the future though when games can effectively utilize a quad core. In conclusion, get a CPU that can perform more instructructions per GHz (Ivy/Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and future microarchitectures) and very high frequency (above 4.2 GHz when overclocked) as well as minimum of 2 or more cores (GHz makes far more improvement to performance in games than more cores).

Probably the best CPU for gaming (assuming you're not a hardcore 24/7 income-earned-solely-from-games person) would be an i5 - 3570k (or 3570, not much of a difference).
i3 cores are generally for budget systems, and i7 cores are for hardcore gamers and people who use alot of editing programs. i7 is also good for editing the same thing (creating spreadsheets etc.) because they can access data faster than the i3 and i5.
Ivy Bridge also has the die shrink which makes it more efficient than older Sandy Bridge Models, so if you're getting any of those cores 3rd gen is the way to go

I used to own a Quad-Core 6600 CPU. Was an awesome Quad-Core. The first Quad-Core they created was the 6600 CPU roughly 4 or 5 years ago. My current PC is roughly 3 years old and it's an i7. Though I'm pretty sure my i7 runs better than my old 6600.

@bobafetthotmail

Maybe the HD videos that your friend is working on are only 1080p AVC H.264 (.MP4) videos at around 7000 Kbit/s. If your friend has to edit native 1080p AVCHD (.m2ts or .mts) at upwards of more than 24000 Kbit/s, I'm very confident that his i3 or even his i5 will choke, especially when video effects like color correction are added straight from the editor.

@bobafetthotmail
As for gaming, an i3 (Sandy/Ivy Bridge) at 3.3 GHz is more than enough to not bottleneck even a GTX 670.