6 ms·

Isn’t most games still dominated by single thread performance?

• kevingadd 3y ago
  To a degree, but it's typically more like 'this workload uses 2-4 cores and wants peak performance on all of them', not really 'this workload uses a single core' on modern games. And then some games will happily use 8+ cores now The user-mode video driver and kernel mode driver both use other cores as well
• dralley 3y ago
  Most games love cache. AMD's X3D CPUs tend to be either better, or at worst extremely competitive with Intel's top chips for games, at a far lower power budget.
• aloknnikhil 3y ago
  But with all the background OS activity, will this chip ever sustain turbo to 6.2 for noticeable periods? Pure benchmarking win imo.
  • vbezhenar 3y ago
    You think 16 efficient cores will not make it?
    • happycube 3y ago
      They're clocked lower.
• hatch_q 3y ago
  Not anymore. Modern games do multi-threading quite good.
• lhl 3y ago
  Largely yes, but the 7800X3D ($370->$300 on sale, 120W TDP) still beats the 14900KS since the extra L3 cache is more important than clock for most games: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/18.... (As mentioned another post here, for even more CPU-intensive games like Factorio, the difference is even starker.) For general mixed workloads (assuming you need more threads), I think the 7950X3D is the way to go - 8 3D VCache cores for similar gaming, 20% cheaper than the 14900KS, generally neck and neck on development workloads but also has AVX512 support, and of course all while using significantly less power (also 120W TDP, 160W PPT - you can do even better w/ PBO+UV or Eco mode). Here's the OOTB power consumption comparison, it's a bit bonkers: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23.html https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i9-14900ks/23....
  • teaearlgraycold 3y ago
    Do the X3D chips with mixed 3D and normal cache still have scheduling issues where games can use the slow cache? Back when they were new I heard you want the 8 core version so you have no chance of that happening.
    • merb 3y ago
      That is still a problem, that is the reason why the 7800x3d is as good as the 7950x3d, but if you do other things, you can go with the 7950x3d it’s more expensive tough
    • lhl 3y ago
      There have been updates on core parking ("Game mode") in Windows so it's probably fine, but I think for max perf, people are still using Process Lasso (I don't use a mixed X3D chip myself, so I haven't paid super close attention to it).
      • noir_lord 3y ago
        I do have a 7950X3D. It’s improved a lot, I still use Lasso but strictly speaking I don’t really need to.
  • fulafel 3y ago
    .. because the cache gives you better single threaded performance?
    • stncls 3y ago
      In many cases yes. Some single-threaded workloads are very sensitive to e.g. memory latency. They end up spending most of their time with the CPU waiting on a cache-missed memory load to arrive. Typically, those would be sequential algorithms with large memory needs and very random (think: hash table) memory accesses. Examples: SAT solvers, anything relying on sparse linear algebra
      • 3y ago