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How much does clock speed really matter for the future of gaming?

Grim5

Grim5

Grim5

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6 Feb 2019
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I found this test very eye opening.

It provides some insight into how cpu thread and clock speed scaling affects performance.

There are actually some games like Doom Eternal that don't care much about clock speed - they will run absolutely fantastic with a 2ghz to 3ghz CPU as long as it has a lot of threads.

Is Doom Eternal's thread scaling the future or do we think we'll keep seeing a lot of games that prefer high clocks like GTA V, CS:GO, WoW, Far Cry 5, RDR2 etc

 
Skyrover said:
Why not both?
Click to expand...

I haven't really seen a game do both yet. The ones that are highly threaded have so much overhead that adding extra clocks doesn't do too much - I guess that's because the CPU is no longer the bottleneck while the ones that are lightly threaded, the CPU is more likely the bottleneck so adding high clocks helps.
 
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AMD started the core wars with the release of their Zen architecture in early 2017, offering 8C/16T at a time when Intel launched their 4C/8T 7700K.

Ironically, the 7700K would end up 2 years later being called "One of the greatest traps of 2017 unleased by Intel on its own customers” by Hardware Unboxed in their Ryzen 1800X vs 7700K 4C vs 8C video.
https://youtu.be/yh6NvJZjLI0?t=741

Most people upgrading today are minimum getting a 6C/12T CPU and now that both MS and Sony’s upcoming consoles will basically have a lower clocked 3700X (8C/16T) inside, there will be even more incentives for developers to optimize for better multi threading in the future.
 
Things were pretty much at a standstill several years before Zen was released but when Zen (Ryzen 1XXX) finally came into the picture, it forced Intel to react by releasing 6 & 8 cores to the mainstream, and it also triggered a price war that reduced prices per core further.

tq1cTil.png
 
From what I understand the main game loop/thread will always need decent clock speed and it's unlikely that will change any time soon, but once that can be done fast enough, then the rest can be offloaded. I would guess Doom Eternal was designed to offload as much as possible, so the main thread is pretty minimal. There's still a limited amount of work that can be done with a new thread at any one time though, so clock speed will still matter. I'm not sure where that point is, but 8 cores is a lot of division, I'd think diminishing returns would set in around there. Though, if games get more complicated, like with AI and weather patterns, then maybe the workload will increase too.
 
NinjaCool said:
...but when Zen (Ryzen 1XXX) finally came into the picture, it forced Intel to react by releasing 6 & 8 cores to the mainstream
Click to expand...

Zen had IPC and other benefits to compete properly, but this was recent. The 'core wars' actually started way before probably 2011 because AMD could not gain anything near intel so tried with the 8 core bulldozer. This was weak in most areas but the odd application that could utilise the cores was actually reasonable, but as it sucked in the gaming stakes it wasn't a consideration to most people.
 
Interesting insight, didn't think AMD pulled ahead so far so quickly.

Regards to the clock speed, it is an interesting discussion considering the consoles always seem to want more cores at lower frequency?
 
The main thing is to go by the GPU usage when it comes to gaming..

As you can tell in that video you posted, If the CPU not fast enough then the GPU usage will be low
 
Grim5 said:
but Doom Eternal scales very well with GPUs too so why can't games do both
Click to expand...

Doom Eternal is a nice game also very simple in terms of how it would load a CPU. The environment is non-destructible (bar a few barrels), the AI is limited to creatures spawning in the room/arena you're in. The physics are tight but limited in scope. There is no netcode to worry about aside from the very small-scale 'Battle Mode'. Compare that to MMOs with hundreds or thousands of entities on screen, or action adventures (Red Dead, Witcher, AC, etc.) where you can visit anything you see in the distance. There are no dynamic changing weather conditions to worry about or NPC armies in the thousands where each unit has to react realistically in combat (Bannerlord). There are no thousands items to loot and track and mod into other items (Tarkov).

Doom 2016 was also very light on CPU load. Games like this are usually very much GPU-bound but represent a pretty small segment of gaming these days. Just look at Minecraft, which is very cpu-heavy until perhaps the RTX update this week.

Taking the Steam charts for example; Bannerlord, Civ 6 expansion and even Fallout 76 are outselling Doom right now (and Bannerlord massively so) and all three represent fairly cpu-limited scenarios (Civ in waiting for AI turn, Bannerlord can load even extreme cpus when 500v500 and Fallout's engine has never been very well optimised for gpu).

Doom has nice tech but there's no reason to assume a game of such limited scope in any way represents the future gaming tech, simply because it's not building to what the majority now buys (and I say this as an old school clanbase fps fanatic).
 
Grim5 said:
I haven't really seen a game do both yet. The ones that are highly threaded have so much overhead that adding extra clocks doesn't do too much - I guess that's because the CPU is no longer the bottleneck while the ones that are lightly threaded, the CPU is more likely the bottleneck so adding high clocks helps.
Click to expand...

some games for years show increases big increase. battlefield in mp for eg with big games. pubg loves overclocks and as much speed you can through at it. car games can get big fps increases. so yes there is games that take avantage but its just whether the user either needs it or notices it. some people cant notice 30 fps increase while some can notice 5. :p
 
What Zen brought is combination of both competitive cores and advantage in core count.
And their roadmap definitely intends to take and keep lead in both, also power efficiency.

Example of Doom Eternal shows that if game programmers spend time on some optimization at design stage, it is possible to make modern game fast.
Unfortunately now it is standard to only start optimizing once they see it doesn't run on a console.
 
Threads are the future. Games that can utilise them well will perform far better than games that can't, as we move from one->two->four->six/eight cores as the 'standard' for new machines, it's a no-brainer.

AMD reckon they have the world's fastest x86 cores now - https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-worlds-fastest-processor-epyc-rome-7fx2-cpus
(In server cores and for server workloads, I have no idea how/if that will translate to desktop)
 
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