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Thanks to the price drop on Zen+ due to the Zen 2 release, I recently built a Ryzen 5 2600 system as my new gaming rig. My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and

Thanks to the price drop on Zen+ due to the Zen 2 release, I recently built a Ryzen 5 2600 system as my new gaming rig. My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and in pretty much every game the CPU bottleneck has disappeared, especially newer titles. Even older single-core-heavy games like CSGO have greatly improved with the new CPU. Basically every game in my collection can now run at 1440p60 (my monitor's native res) instead of being limited to 1080p60. Switching from a GeForce 1060 to a RX 580 allowed me to ramp up the quality at that resolution as well (in most games). Further, now that Zen+ support in Linux and OpenBSD has improved, it is a stable enough platform for those OSes. My new rig is doing double duty as my main workstation now thanks to that support along with switching to an AMD GPU. I honestly don't think Intel and Nvidia have a place in my home and office anymore. My media server is an ancient Dell PowerEdge T310 and it's still going strong, but it is limited on drive capacity and has issues transcoding more than one 1080p+ stream at a time, so I believe I'll be retiring it soon in favor of a Zen based custom build.

gambiting 7y ago
>>My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and in pretty much every game the CPU bottleneck has disappeared I'm not being funny - have you ever found any kind of bottleneck with that CPU? I'm still rocking an i7-4970K + 1080Ti and I have never ever seen the CPU being anywhere close to max load in any game, and I'm mostly playing in 1440p@60fps.
- morganvachon 7y ago
  It was mostly with single-core-heavy (i.e. older) games. Newer multi-core games did very well on the i5, but better still on the six core Ryzen. I mostly play older games so my experience is likely different from most gamers. Edit: An example from memory, the very old game Crysis stuttered badly at 1440p with the i5, it was only playable at 1080p (both resolutions with all graphics settings on highest/ultra); this was with the GTX 1060. When I first built the Ryzen system I carried over my GTX 1060, and was able to play that game at 1440p60 smooth as butter. Turning off vsync I was getting close to 100fps, whereas with the i5 and vsync off I was lucky to spike above 70, with average fps somewhere around 30-35. Moving to the RX 580 actually dropped the fps cap slightly with vsync off, but still allowed me to play at 60fps locked for a smoother experience overall. In general, this was the same experience with all of my older games (Skyrim, Far Cry 2, Mirror's Edge, Rust, etc). With newer multi-core games like Doom 2016 and Far Cry 4 I never had any CPU bottleneck on the i5, and the new system marked an increase in graphic quality without sacrificing smoothness and resolution.
  - kpozin 7y ago
    Does anyone know of good articles about parallelism in modern game engines? All I've been able to find is a couple of slides in a deck about Doom 2016.
- penagwin 7y ago
  I went from a i5-7600k to a i7-8700k and noticed decent performance increases with my GTX 1070. (CS is netoriously CPU bound). I've since upgraded to a 1080ti, I don't know how much performance was from the cpu upgrade and how much was due to the extra cores the rest of the system could use without interfering with the game.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Try Total War: Warhammer I/II with that machine. Does your i7-4970K have DDR4 RAM?
  - gambiting 7y ago
    No, it's running DDR3 at 2333MHz. I mean I know it's not the latest and greatest but just as an example it plays Control at max settings at 1440p in locked 60fps, that's why I'm curious what kind of game could make it CPU-constrained because I just haven't ran into any yet. But then admittedly I haven't played any Warhammer games either.
    - morganvachon 7y ago
      Keep in mind too that your i7-4790K is much more powerful than my newer i5-7400 was. It’s almost on par with my Ryzen CPU. If you had a Haswell i5 instead of an i7 you’d likely have bottlenecks like I did. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-4790K-vs-Intel-i5-7400-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-2600/2275vs2929vs3243 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-4790K-vs-Intel...
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        GP said they're using i7-4970K; it is likely they meant i7-4790K. I'm using the i7-4770K. Which misses a certain virtualization hardware extension this K-series does not have, but the other ones in the series do have. Which pisses me off to not hand. For that fact alone, I won't buy an Intel CPU. Thank you for the comparison, btw. Very useful.

gambiting 7y ago

>>My old gaming machine had a i5-7400, and in pretty much every game the CPU bottleneck has disappeared I'm not being funny - have you ever found any kind of bottleneck with that CPU? I'm still rocking an i7-4970K + 1080Ti and I have never ever seen the CPU being anywhere close to max load in any game, and I'm mostly playing in 1440p@60fps.

morganvachon 7y ago
It was mostly with single-core-heavy (i.e. older) games. Newer multi-core games did very well on the i5, but better still on the six core Ryzen. I mostly play older games so my experience is likely different from most gamers. Edit: An example from memory, the very old game Crysis stuttered badly at 1440p with the i5, it was only playable at 1080p (both resolutions with all graphics settings on highest/ultra); this was with the GTX 1060. When I first built the Ryzen system I carried over my GTX 1060, and was able to play that game at 1440p60 smooth as butter. Turning off vsync I was getting close to 100fps, whereas with the i5 and vsync off I was lucky to spike above 70, with average fps somewhere around 30-35. Moving to the RX 580 actually dropped the fps cap slightly with vsync off, but still allowed me to play at 60fps locked for a smoother experience overall. In general, this was the same experience with all of my older games (Skyrim, Far Cry 2, Mirror's Edge, Rust, etc). With newer multi-core games like Doom 2016 and Far Cry 4 I never had any CPU bottleneck on the i5, and the new system marked an increase in graphic quality without sacrificing smoothness and resolution.
- kpozin 7y ago
  Does anyone know of good articles about parallelism in modern game engines? All I've been able to find is a couple of slides in a deck about Doom 2016.
penagwin 7y ago
I went from a i5-7600k to a i7-8700k and noticed decent performance increases with my GTX 1070. (CS is netoriously CPU bound). I've since upgraded to a 1080ti, I don't know how much performance was from the cpu upgrade and how much was due to the extra cores the rest of the system could use without interfering with the game.
Fnoord 7y ago
Try Total War: Warhammer I/II with that machine. Does your i7-4970K have DDR4 RAM?
- gambiting 7y ago
  No, it's running DDR3 at 2333MHz. I mean I know it's not the latest and greatest but just as an example it plays Control at max settings at 1440p in locked 60fps, that's why I'm curious what kind of game could make it CPU-constrained because I just haven't ran into any yet. But then admittedly I haven't played any Warhammer games either.
  - morganvachon 7y ago
    Keep in mind too that your i7-4790K is much more powerful than my newer i5-7400 was. It’s almost on par with my Ryzen CPU. If you had a Haswell i5 instead of an i7 you’d likely have bottlenecks like I did. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-4790K-vs-Intel-i5-7400-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-2600/2275vs2929vs3243 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-4790K-vs-Intel...
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      GP said they're using i7-4970K; it is likely they meant i7-4790K. I'm using the i7-4770K. Which misses a certain virtualization hardware extension this K-series does not have, but the other ones in the series do have. Which pisses me off to not hand. For that fact alone, I won't buy an Intel CPU. Thank you for the comparison, btw. Very useful.