4 ms·

Depends on workload, and we've seen that with the latest round of AMD offerings. As a gamer, yes, but that's really it.

gpm 7y ago
Are there actually games that take advantage of a CPU this fast? I would imagine that all the game developers would be targeting the more modest hardware that most of their players actually have.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor. In that regard all the game has to do to "take advantage" of the CPU is support high or unlocked framerates and high resolutions.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    > Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor I sort of doubt this is true, if only for the reason that most people don't buy a new CPU, GPU, and monitor at the same time. monitor and pc are probably going to be on different upgrade cycles, unless the monitor came with the pc (in which case, probably not "top end"). for DIYers, the GPU and CPU+RAM+mobo are likely also on different upgrade cycles. I bought my current 4K monitor about four years ago, but I ran most games at 1080p until I had enough spare cash to buy a 1080 ti. I finally upgraded my CPU, RAM, and motherboard this year, mainly because I was tired of having 8GB of DDR3. in any case, it's usually not a rational use of funds to buy the fastest CPU and GPU for a 4K monitor unless your budget is unlimited. with a constrained budget, it's usually better to drop a tier or two on the CPU if it gets you the next higher tier GPU.
- InvaderFizz 7y ago
  Anything high refresh rate(120+Hz) benefits immensely from these high clock rates. The high clocks result in less pipeline stalls meaning your high frame rates are more achievable as well as significantly reducing the dips (0.1% lows is what every reviewer hates). This isnt about "average", this is about having the best experience possible, which Intel provides in this very specific scenario. Intel has three things going for it(in the consumer space), which matter a lot or not at all to different folks: - better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) - Intel's QuickSync is fantastic for media encode/decode (NVENC is typically better, AMD is basically non-existent) - Intel has the highest clock rates. Outside of these niches, AMD is dominating at every level of the product stack.
  - leetcrew 7y ago
    > better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) I don't think this point is true anymore for the latest laptop processors.
    - InvaderFizz 7y ago
      It's certainly closer than it has ever been, the mobile Ryzen 4000 series is a massive improvement across the board. At the high and medium end, it completely dominates Intel. Where Intel still rules (in x86 land) is that all day battery life. They're simply better, for now. I think mobile Ryzen 5000 may take over even that niche, but it remains to be seen.
      - ben-schaaf 7y ago
        From all the tests I've seen, AMD has a power consumption advantage compared to intel. This directly translates into longer battery life. While there's probably situations where Intel has better battery life due to software maturity, we've already seen tests where in low load situations amd is beating intel. During high load it's not even a competition at this point.
      - Symmetry 7y ago
        Intel started getting serious about system battery life with Centrino and AMD is still catching up a bit, though they're doing that very rapidly. EDIT: Celeron -> Centrino
- cybwraith 7y ago
  VR games, and simulation games tend to have high single-core CPU speed requirements for smooth play. Mostly though this is due to outdated engines (in the case of sims) or inexperienced/indie devs using premade engines like Unity and Unreal in a way that loads mostly a single core. Some tasks like physics, sound, texture loading is pretty easy to put on separate threads but thats usually a small fraction what bottlenecks a CPU in a game.
  - mrguyorama 7y ago
    Eh, my i5-4440 had zero trouble running current VR games at 90hz, including while doing other things like playing Spotify or running music from a web browser, or even streaming and recording.
- paulmd 7y ago
  Simulation titles and open world titles tend to be very sensitive to per-core performance and memory latency (there is in fact noticeable performance scaling on these titles with faster memory even on Intel architectures - Fallout 4 is up to 20% faster going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-4000). https://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performance/page3.html https://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performa... I've seen some people on Reddit running modded Skyrim (can probably throw Fallout 3/4/etc into that bucket as well) who are really mad about the performance of their Zen2 processors. ARMA3 probably runs poorly. That kind of thing. Also, DAW performance is not very good on Zen. That said, even in games that use more threads, there is often noticeable performance scaling from having faster per-thread ("single core") performance because there is one thread that is bottlenecking everything else. No real-world game ever has the magical 0% serial code necessary to scale perfectly according to Amdahl's law. It is just a question of whether that scaling starts dropping off at 6 cores, or 8 cores, or maybe 10 cores. Very few games can saturate a 3900X or 3950X yet, maybe Ashes of the Singularity but I doubt much else.
  - nwallin 7y ago
    > Also, DAW performance is not very good on Zen. Why is this? It's something I've heard a lot but I don't understand why. Is it something fundamental about audio, or is it simply the case that The Application With the Mindshare isn't architectured in a way that multithreading works well? Personally, my day job is working on a program that could support 4-16-64 threads just fine, but since a lot of the core architecture is from the 90s and there's a giant ball of globals, component object model/single threaded apartment spaghetti deep under the hood, multithreading even trivially parallelizable tasks is fraught with peril. Fortunately for my employer, we are an entrenched 800 pound gorilla, and we can skate on momentum while these issues get fixed. So I totally understand if it's the same in a specialized space like DAW. re: Skyrim. That engine is a fork of a fork of an engine that was written in 1997. Skyrim ran like garbage when it was released in 2011. It has nothing to do with open world or so forth, it's just run of the mill legacy architecture problems. ARMA3 (released 2013) is in a similar boat- it's a very old game engine written by a very small (they're not indie, but they're close) development studio. Both of these studios have the same problem my employer has- they have a bunch of legacy cruft that's difficult to migrate away from. There's a tipping point somewhere. With two physical cores, you don't gain that much from farming stuff out to the different cores. A lot of multithreaded stuff from that era had a sequential-concurrent model. Your one large task was broken down in a sequential series of subtasks. (usually it was gather input, do AI, do physics, do drawing) Sometimes those subtasks would break out into N threads, which do a small amount of stuff in parallel, then there's a "join the world" event, you move on to the next subtask. Think links of sausages; sometimes it's wide, sometimes it's narrow, but you never have two sausages at the same time. This model is very sensitive to single threaded performance, because all of the join the world events are single threaded, and at the end there's a giant pile of single threaded calls to OpenGL which is a single threaded API. We're steadily moving away from that. First of all, the game loop went from having a giant mutable ball of state, to having a generational immutable world state. One pile of threads would compute world state generation N+1, and a second giant pile of threads would draw world state generation N. Both would depend on generation N, but since generation N was immutable, that was fine. This can be broken down further- it's fine to generate new AI priorities for gen N+1 using the physics state from gen N, and use the AI priorities defined in gen N to do physics to generate gen N+1. So AI and physics can happen on independent threads. This can be broken down further- chop the world up into zones, and give responsibility for each zone to individual jobs. We're also switching from OpenGL (with its internal state machine, single threaded API) to Vulkan, which has completely blown open the drawing steps. I think Valve did some benchmarking where where the single threaded chunk of OpenGL took 5ms, (which is an eternity) but the single threaded chunk of Vulkan was ~1 microsecond. The 4.999ms of CPU time still exists under Vulkan, it didn't just go away- but now it can happen in parallel on multiple threads. Instead of having 3-20 join the world events each frame, there's only one, and the only thing that happens there is a pointer swap. The industry is moving away from single threaded engines like ARMA3's and Bethesda's in house engines. For the most part, AAA games since ~5 years ago properly utilize multiple cores. ARMA3 and Skyrim are dinosaurs, and they've aged about as well.
- robotnikman 7y ago
  Minecraft comes to mind. People looking to host a server usually need good single core performance depending on how many players there are and mods installed
- gnulinux 7y ago
  Simulation games like Factorio, Rimworld, Kerbal Space Program, Dwarffortress etc use 100% of single CPU and <10% of others. In factorio, I can make ginormous factories that are bottlenecked by a single CPU. Sometimes say my factory produces X rockets per game-minute. I make a bigger factory that produces Y rockets per game-minute where Y >> X but since now CPU cannot handle the load I now produce <X rockets per real-time minute. So making my factory bigger was a net negative in terms of rocket per real-minute.

gpm 7y ago

Are there actually games that take advantage of a CPU this fast? I would imagine that all the game developers would be targeting the more modest hardware that most of their players actually have.

zamadatix 7y ago
Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor. In that regard all the game has to do to "take advantage" of the CPU is support high or unlocked framerates and high resolutions.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > Generally those with the top end CPU have the top end GPU and the top end monitor I sort of doubt this is true, if only for the reason that most people don't buy a new CPU, GPU, and monitor at the same time. monitor and pc are probably going to be on different upgrade cycles, unless the monitor came with the pc (in which case, probably not "top end"). for DIYers, the GPU and CPU+RAM+mobo are likely also on different upgrade cycles. I bought my current 4K monitor about four years ago, but I ran most games at 1080p until I had enough spare cash to buy a 1080 ti. I finally upgraded my CPU, RAM, and motherboard this year, mainly because I was tired of having 8GB of DDR3. in any case, it's usually not a rational use of funds to buy the fastest CPU and GPU for a 4K monitor unless your budget is unlimited. with a constrained budget, it's usually better to drop a tier or two on the CPU if it gets you the next higher tier GPU.
InvaderFizz 7y ago
Anything high refresh rate(120+Hz) benefits immensely from these high clock rates. The high clocks result in less pipeline stalls meaning your high frame rates are more achievable as well as significantly reducing the dips (0.1% lows is what every reviewer hates). This isnt about "average", this is about having the best experience possible, which Intel provides in this very specific scenario. Intel has three things going for it(in the consumer space), which matter a lot or not at all to different folks: - better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) - Intel's QuickSync is fantastic for media encode/decode (NVENC is typically better, AMD is basically non-existent) - Intel has the highest clock rates. Outside of these niches, AMD is dominating at every level of the product stack.
- leetcrew 7y ago
  > better idle/low usage power consumption than AMD (low load laptop battery life) I don't think this point is true anymore for the latest laptop processors.
  - InvaderFizz 7y ago
    It's certainly closer than it has ever been, the mobile Ryzen 4000 series is a massive improvement across the board. At the high and medium end, it completely dominates Intel. Where Intel still rules (in x86 land) is that all day battery life. They're simply better, for now. I think mobile Ryzen 5000 may take over even that niche, but it remains to be seen.
    - ben-schaaf 7y ago
      From all the tests I've seen, AMD has a power consumption advantage compared to intel. This directly translates into longer battery life. While there's probably situations where Intel has better battery life due to software maturity, we've already seen tests where in low load situations amd is beating intel. During high load it's not even a competition at this point.
    - Symmetry 7y ago
      Intel started getting serious about system battery life with Centrino and AMD is still catching up a bit, though they're doing that very rapidly. EDIT: Celeron -> Centrino
cybwraith 7y ago
VR games, and simulation games tend to have high single-core CPU speed requirements for smooth play. Mostly though this is due to outdated engines (in the case of sims) or inexperienced/indie devs using premade engines like Unity and Unreal in a way that loads mostly a single core. Some tasks like physics, sound, texture loading is pretty easy to put on separate threads but thats usually a small fraction what bottlenecks a CPU in a game.
- mrguyorama 7y ago
  Eh, my i5-4440 had zero trouble running current VR games at 90hz, including while doing other things like playing Spotify or running music from a web browser, or even streaming and recording.
paulmd 7y ago
Simulation titles and open world titles tend to be very sensitive to per-core performance and memory latency (there is in fact noticeable performance scaling on these titles with faster memory even on Intel architectures - Fallout 4 is up to 20% faster going from DDR4-2133 to DDR4-4000). https://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performance/page3.html https://www.techspot.com/article/1171-ddr4-4000-mhz-performa... I've seen some people on Reddit running modded Skyrim (can probably throw Fallout 3/4/etc into that bucket as well) who are really mad about the performance of their Zen2 processors. ARMA3 probably runs poorly. That kind of thing. Also, DAW performance is not very good on Zen. That said, even in games that use more threads, there is often noticeable performance scaling from having faster per-thread ("single core") performance because there is one thread that is bottlenecking everything else. No real-world game ever has the magical 0% serial code necessary to scale perfectly according to Amdahl's law. It is just a question of whether that scaling starts dropping off at 6 cores, or 8 cores, or maybe 10 cores. Very few games can saturate a 3900X or 3950X yet, maybe Ashes of the Singularity but I doubt much else.
- nwallin 7y ago
  > Also, DAW performance is not very good on Zen. Why is this? It's something I've heard a lot but I don't understand why. Is it something fundamental about audio, or is it simply the case that The Application With the Mindshare isn't architectured in a way that multithreading works well? Personally, my day job is working on a program that could support 4-16-64 threads just fine, but since a lot of the core architecture is from the 90s and there's a giant ball of globals, component object model/single threaded apartment spaghetti deep under the hood, multithreading even trivially parallelizable tasks is fraught with peril. Fortunately for my employer, we are an entrenched 800 pound gorilla, and we can skate on momentum while these issues get fixed. So I totally understand if it's the same in a specialized space like DAW. re: Skyrim. That engine is a fork of a fork of an engine that was written in 1997. Skyrim ran like garbage when it was released in 2011. It has nothing to do with open world or so forth, it's just run of the mill legacy architecture problems. ARMA3 (released 2013) is in a similar boat- it's a very old game engine written by a very small (they're not indie, but they're close) development studio. Both of these studios have the same problem my employer has- they have a bunch of legacy cruft that's difficult to migrate away from. There's a tipping point somewhere. With two physical cores, you don't gain that much from farming stuff out to the different cores. A lot of multithreaded stuff from that era had a sequential-concurrent model. Your one large task was broken down in a sequential series of subtasks. (usually it was gather input, do AI, do physics, do drawing) Sometimes those subtasks would break out into N threads, which do a small amount of stuff in parallel, then there's a "join the world" event, you move on to the next subtask. Think links of sausages; sometimes it's wide, sometimes it's narrow, but you never have two sausages at the same time. This model is very sensitive to single threaded performance, because all of the join the world events are single threaded, and at the end there's a giant pile of single threaded calls to OpenGL which is a single threaded API. We're steadily moving away from that. First of all, the game loop went from having a giant mutable ball of state, to having a generational immutable world state. One pile of threads would compute world state generation N+1, and a second giant pile of threads would draw world state generation N. Both would depend on generation N, but since generation N was immutable, that was fine. This can be broken down further- it's fine to generate new AI priorities for gen N+1 using the physics state from gen N, and use the AI priorities defined in gen N to do physics to generate gen N+1. So AI and physics can happen on independent threads. This can be broken down further- chop the world up into zones, and give responsibility for each zone to individual jobs. We're also switching from OpenGL (with its internal state machine, single threaded API) to Vulkan, which has completely blown open the drawing steps. I think Valve did some benchmarking where where the single threaded chunk of OpenGL took 5ms, (which is an eternity) but the single threaded chunk of Vulkan was ~1 microsecond. The 4.999ms of CPU time still exists under Vulkan, it didn't just go away- but now it can happen in parallel on multiple threads. Instead of having 3-20 join the world events each frame, there's only one, and the only thing that happens there is a pointer swap. The industry is moving away from single threaded engines like ARMA3's and Bethesda's in house engines. For the most part, AAA games since ~5 years ago properly utilize multiple cores. ARMA3 and Skyrim are dinosaurs, and they've aged about as well.
robotnikman 7y ago
Minecraft comes to mind. People looking to host a server usually need good single core performance depending on how many players there are and mods installed
gnulinux 7y ago
Simulation games like Factorio, Rimworld, Kerbal Space Program, Dwarffortress etc use 100% of single CPU and <10% of others. In factorio, I can make ginormous factories that are bottlenecked by a single CPU. Sometimes say my factory produces X rockets per game-minute. I make a bigger factory that produces Y rockets per game-minute where Y >> X but since now CPU cannot handle the load I now produce <X rockets per real-time minute. So making my factory bigger was a net negative in terms of rocket per real-minute.