Ask HN: Where did the CPU-bound games go?

GPUs are very effective at relatively straighforward operations which are easy to parallelize. They're great for graphics and physics calculations, which obviously play a big part in games. Also, GPUs continue to find new uses in areas which could be considered surprising, such as scientific computing and deep learning.

Games these days seem to increasingly care about GPU and common advice is to put as little money in CPU as you can get away with. There's a certain threshold you need make a GPU humming properly, but don't go beyond that. Unless you need it for other things, like compilation, encoding, etc. Consoles are especially notorious for this, in the recent models I read about they don't even have separate video and CPU memory. Consoles have a reputation for being stereotypical "dumb blondes" - having games that look good but aren't that smart. No RTS games for example, although you could say it's mostly down to control issues.

Are the last few generations of PC games so GPU heavy because their main target is actually consoles and PC support is an afterthought? Are consoles to blame here at all?

I read in a HN comment that one of advantages CPUs have is conditional logic. What are the types of calculation that are much better performed on CPUs? Especially in context of games?

What kind of game could hypothetically use a lot of CPU and not care about GPU? Dwarf Fortress is single threaded, so is Rimworld. Noita has "the more cores the better" on Steam page, but rumors are circulating that it's not actually multicore friendly. Ashes of Singularity is the only game I know which actually scales nicely with more CPU cores.

What about RAM? Memory is relatively inexpensive. What kind of game might need a ton of RAM but not so much VRAM (Video RAM / GPU RAM)?