Will an upgrade now be any better than my last?

[Vexr]

A few years ago the main game I fell in love with was Dishonored 2, on my FX-8350 and GTX 970 at a whopping 3440x1440 @ 60 Hz (I was part of the early uptake of UWQHD monitors back around 2016)

A while later I upgraded everything and looked forward to revisiting the game, which I did so on my Ryzen 2700 and GTX 1070 Ti, which was soon replaced with a Radeon 5700 XT, and I got a new Freesync 100 Hz UWQHD display.

And you know what? I got almost zero improvement in FPS with the full system upgrade, because the game's engine (Void) happened to be garbage.

With this experience haunting my mind, what the hell am I supposed to do now for an upgrade?

I get the feeling I should just get a 5800X3D, replay games that were previously CPU limited (yet not limited enough that there was a noticeable difference between an FX-8350 and Ryzen 2700, as in Dishonored's case), and revisit the GPU situation much later.

Or else I should look at converting my current system in to an old console-emulating box to sit next to my TV, and buy a completely new prebuilt system?

 

[Vexr]

I couldn't comment on a specific game (I don't know much about how Dishonored performs), but the 5800X3D is definitely a big upgrade on the 2700. The problem is, going from these charts, it looks like you're more likely to be GPU limited right now, since they show next to zero difference between Zen to Zen 3 with a 5700 XT in the majority of games at 1440p.

You could get an upgrade on the 5700 XT, but then, CPU/GPU scaling charts like these (0, 1, 2) suggest there's a ceiling around a 6800 XT, beyond which your CPU is going to be bottlenecking the card.

0. This shows that using a 4090 with a 2600X nearly doubles the FPS at 1440p from a 1080 Ti, but a 5600X nearly doubles the FPS again on the 2600X, suggesting that the 4090 is only achieving half (or less, as even the 5600X bottlenecks it) of what it is capable of.
1. These charts are at 1080p, but even with a CPU that is faster than the 2700 in games (i3-13100), not many games show an improvement between the RX 6950 XT and 4090. Though, there is a decent improvement from the 6650 XT to the 6950 XT (this is part of how I guesstimate a 6800 XT to be the ceiling).

If you only have the budget for the X3D, I'm not sure you're going to find it all that useful, but it would give you the headroom for the GPU upgrade.

I thought I'd been paying good attention to many YouTuber's / review sites regarding these types of issues. Cheers for the links to discussing some of these topics closer - I was unaware.

Regarding a CPU bottleneck, I was playing even WoW WOTLK/TBC Classic for a while, but my 2700 was insufficient to hit the 100 fps I asked of it. Dishonored 2 just adds even more question marks, as we all know now the FX-8350 should be unplayable, but the Ryzen 2700 of the time should have been okay.

 

[Vexr]

Thanks for the suggestions. I must confess I'm conflicted on what to do. I recall hearing someone stating their 5700 XT finally got to stretch its legs when they upgraded from an older Ryzen, despite playing at 1440P+ and generally being considered GPU-bound.

 

[Vexr]

A while ago I'd have pulled the trigger on a 5700X upgrade at £180. However, the idea has since gained traction in my mind that all Ryzen 5000s and less (other than the X3D) are somehow broken for gaming with poor 1% lows especially.

Also, that my 3000 MHz CL15 RAM (which I unfortunately bought when DDR4 was at its eye watering peak) will gimp any other Ryzen, except for the X3D.

 

[Vexr]

Food for thought, I must admit. With the difference between a 5700X and 5800X3D price wise being about £120 at best, that hardly seems significant when putting any saving on the CPU toward an insanely overpriced GPU. But in terms of normal real life, that £120 is the difference between a satisfactory purchase or being ripped off for what you've ended up with.

My GPU upgrade sweet spot would be somewhere between a 4070 Ti 16 GB (if that existed) and a 4080. This is certainly the last hurrah of this PC. My 750W PSU is at least 12 years old: its champion years had it running an FX-8350 and 2x GTX 970s in SLI. My case is falling apart and has a max GPU length of 290 mm. My motherboard lost 3x SATA ports when I utilised its M.2 drive for the first time, forcing me to get rid of a HDD. It also has no onboard WiFi, forcing me to use a USB dongle that sometimes crashes, and of course it is only PCI-3.0.

Otherwise it's an awesome system But perhaps not quite deserving of a 5800X3D in the hope it'll be bossing it in games for years to come.

 

[Vexr]

Personally (and I don't mean this condescendingly), I think this is what happens when we watch too many YouTube videos

To give some context to that, what I mean is: benches are done to deliberately exaggerate performance differences between CPUs, through the use of low settings/resolutions and high-end GPUs. So, it makes the previous generations look far less capable than they actually are, because otherwise (if they test CPUs at 4K, for example) you'd just see a bunch of boring charts with nearly the same FPS. This is especially true if you don't use a high-refresh monitor and are happy with modest fps (e.g. 60 - 90 rather than 150-200).

With a CPU upgrade, I think you've always got to consider: where am I realistically going to take this system, what are my expectations and what games am I playing? If say, your max upgrade is something in the region of a 4070 Ti or 7900 XT, then a 5600/5700X is going to be fine. If on the other hand, you want the CPU to last for 2-3 GPU upgrades, then yeah, current benches are projecting that a 5600/5700X is not going to handle that.

In your case, you're content to play some older/classic games and it is a fact that Zen 3 has considerably higher gaming performance than Zen+ (lows included). Zen+ was never that strong, even on release, but Zen 3 is. Zen & Zen+ are actually more vulnerable to the use of slower memory than Zen 3 too, partly because Zen 3 has more cache. At the high resolution you're using, memory speed is also going to be less important.

Thank you for a convincing take on my situation. I now have a Ryzen 5700X, and I confess, other than smoothing over some unacceptable FPS dips in CPU-bound situations, I'm not seeing a massive difference between the 5700X and my old 2700 with my 5700 XT GPU at an UWQHD resolution.

I'm pretty sure a 5800X3D would have been a massive waste on my system, even with ambitions to upgrade to something 3080 Ti-like+.