Really depends on how useful more threads become. If games start using 8 to 16 threads then the Ryzen line gets way more interesting. Or the 8700 and 8700k for Intel. The 8350K is interesting but at that price point the Ryzen 1600 isn't much more. We'll know soon with full benchmarks in about 10 days.
To be honest though need someone smarter than me on the topic to showcase how a game would compare on a 4 core 8 thread cpu verus a 6 core 6 thread cpu for a game that uses all 8 threads.
I have yet to see a game which uses more than ~70% CPU usage on my R7-1700X, and even that is rare. Honestly, most games stay below 25% usage.
The best multi-threaded games spread the workload evenly, so you might see cores in a range of 60-75%, but most games end up with a single main thread that has much higher CPU usage than the rest - which is why per-core performance is often the main factor for game performance.
So that makes a pretty strong case for a 6c/12t CPU, if you're only using it for gaming.
Of course if you're wanting to record/stream video on the CPU, it means you have a whole 2c/4t that you could dedicate to that task, or any other kind of task that you might have running in the background without there being a noticeable impact on the game's performance.
Or if you're wanting something that is really good for other tasks that can take advantage of all 8c/16t, but is also good for gaming - if not the best.
From what I've seen, things like Cinebench scores for the i7-8700K are in the same ballpark as the R5-1600/X, so those two cores that the R7 CPUs have are still going to make a difference for heavier workloads.
Still rocking a
i7-930@3.5ghz...lol It came out in 2010. Maybe I gotta upgrade soon. Can game acceptably on 1080P still with a 970. Insane this build has lasted 7 years.
If you monitor GPU usage, I would expect to see your 970 under-utilized in a lot of games, unless you are choosing video settings which are demanding enough that it would never be able to hit 60 FPS anyway.
With an i5-2500K at 4.5GHz, I was being CPU-limited when I had a GTX 960.
CPU-intense Gaming (Arma, PUBG, Witcher) in general. Some light streaming.
ARMA is not a CPU-intensive game. The issue is that it's practically single-threaded and doesn't utilize much of the CPU at all.