Allen
Hotshot
Joined: Oct 1999
Posts: 8,839
Ohio USA
I remember paying about $500 for a cutting edge AMD graphics card having 48 shaders. Now, the cutting edge (for AMD) is 4096 shaders running at much higher clocks -- and games are beginning to use that many -- though arguably they don't really need that many. We're only talking a bit over a decade for an almost factor of 100 increase (accounting for shader count and GPU clocks).
Using multi CPU threads is harder to program. Moreover, games are/were made around Intel CPUs -- which only had 4 cores/threads at reasonable prices.
But, Intel has joined the high core count party (up to 18 core/36 thread Intel CPUs are on the way). That is very likely a "game changer". If Intel makes it, the game companies will think differently -- and use it, eventually.
In the future, games will still run on 4 cores -- with reduced settings. But, they will run best on 16+ cores. Folks who want maximum performance regardless of cost (currently Intel/Nivida high end customers) will go for high CPU core count because it will deliver the top FPS numbers. My opinion, of course