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> Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU
by blattimwind 7y ago
> Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize.
On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU utilization reaching peaks of 80-90 %.
Yes, it maybe be hard to parallelize game engines, but all major ones heavily use multiple cores. A bunch of years ago (4-5) people would recommend an i3-K dual core for gaming, because you could overclock it to 5+ GHz on air. That was sufficient for many titles back then. (And these i3s would sometimes give you higher FPS compared to the more expensive quad-core options). But a CPU like that is far too weak for newer titles.
> You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. If you have a task that doesn't parallelize well, you can't beat intel.
In terms of heat, that is, performance per Watt, Intel's high end is quite a bit worse than AMD's. It is true however that you can get slightly higher single-threaded performance out of Intel's highest-end CPUs, but not because they are more efficient (- AMD is better both perf/W and IPC-wise), but just by raw, unadulterated clock speed, pushing them to 5+ GHz. And that causes them to burn a lot of power.
Zen 2 has consistently ~10-15 % higher performance clock-for-clock compared to Intel's best while achieving approximately 60-80 % higher perf/W.
This LTT review captures the massive advantage Zen 2 has in efficiency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqG31V4qtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYqG31V4qtA
- velox_io 7y agoThe efficiency at load is great, the power usage at idle could use some improvement (I feel there's a missing update). My previous system (6700k boasting to 4.6ghz) used about 50 watts at idle (from the wall). After I switched motherboard and CPU (a 3950x, the rest is the same, plus new Windows install) the power usage at idle is ~90 watts. The power management is too eager to use all the cores, I'm pretty sure their would be zero decernable difference if they shutdown one of the CCDs (chiplets) when utilisation is low. I've played around with the power settings and ~90w is about the best it gets. Under load the system is brilliant (it's 4x faster with the same power usage, makes using my laptop painfully slow in comparison). The power management on these CPUs is incredibly advanced (each core runs at different speeds & voltages), I'm just surprised that it doesn't do better at idle.
- blattimwind 7y agoThe 3900X and 3950X sadly still have issues with idle power, the lower end chips do much better. A 3400G for example self-reports less than 10 W at idle, entire system is around 20 W out of the power socket. The uncore of my 3900X consumes more than that in idle according to itself... The usual desktop (3500-3800 series) chips perform similarly well, it's just the two-chiplet AM4 processors that have been somewhat plagued by problems like this.
- mrguyorama 7y agoI was running into issues where just having Steam open, not doing anything at all, caused a R5 3600 to go from 2 watts, to 13 watts power usage. Start closing background processes. There might be one doing weird stuff keeping cores awake
- serf 7y ago>On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU utilization reaching peaks of 80-90 %. which ones? genuinely curious. I have two Intel E5 eight-cores in an old workstation and rarely ever see a game using more than 2-4 threads. I guess i'm not spending my time on the latest and great AAA games as soon as they come out, but i've spent quite a few (shameful) hours gaming on fairly recent titles.
- dijit 7y agoThe Division (a game I worked on) is quite well optimised for multi core. In fact it’s one of the reasons we made our own game engine.
- 0-_-0 7y agoDoom Eternal doesn't even have a main thread and uses a dependency graph of jobs, so should paralellize reeeeally well across multiple cores
- blattimwind 7y agoRise and Shadow of the Tomb Raider is very CPU intensive and seems to use as many cores as you can feed it.