Will any high end games meaningfully benefit from more than 8 cores anytime in the near future?

[Wolverine2349]

I am thinking of going with a Ryzen 9 5900X simply because it has 12 cores. Unfortunately Intel is stuck at 8 good cores and I am not fond of the hybrid arch.

Though Intel Golden Cove are the best P cores there are. Though how much better really are they than Zen 3 cores.

Cause I could purchase a 12900K or 12700K and just use it as an 8 core part by disabling the e-cores and run WIN10 normally without worry over games using the e cores or other scheduling issues and slower ringbus.

Also my plan would be to shut off HT/SMT if I have more than 8 cores. With 8 cores a tossup and less leave it on.

Does HT/SMT help much for gaming if at all or even hurt it if core count is high??

Like how would 8 cores 16 threads be compared to 12 cores and 12 threads for gaming now and into the future with video card upgrades down the road.

Is more physical real cores going to matter anytime soon?

I intend to continue gaming at 1440p maxing out all settings in games with an RTX 3090 Ti.

 

[mrk]

You only have to look at any of the many reviews out there to answer your first few question. P/E core layout is the way things are now and AMD will go this route too last I read. The games that /did/ have issues with the ecores have all been sorted and as it stands, there are no issues remaining. As it stands, 12th gen or newer is where you want to be now if building new as they are just better. Even a 12600K is way more horsepower than what games will utilise for a long time yet. Again you can see CPU utilisation in games that compare stats and you will see that none of these modern chips from the last few years from either side are really being heavily taxed at any decent resolution that people will be using today.

There is no reasonable need outside of really old games or emulators to disable E cores or mess around in that regard.

GPU and soon, NVMe (Direct Storage) gen will make more difference in games going forwards.

 

[Wolverine2349]

You only have to look at any of the many reviews out there to answer your first few question. P/E core layout is the way things are now and AMD will go this route too last I read. The games that /did/ have issues with the ecores have all been sorted and as it stands, there are no issues remaining. As it stands, 12th gen or newer is where you want to be now if building new as they are just better. Even a 12600K is way more horsepower than what games will utilise for a long time yet. Again you can see CPU utilisation in games that compare stats and you will see that none of these modern chips from the last few years from either side are really being heavily taxed at any decent resolution that people will be using today.

There is no reasonable need outside of really old games or emulators to disable E cores or mess around in that regard.

GPU and soon, NVMe (Direct Storage) gen will make more difference in games going forwards.

I had tried 12th gen and it seemed the e cores caused more issues than they were worth even on WIN11. Sometimes an important task would get stuck on them. Where as background tasks like AntiVirus and HWInfo64 and MSI Afterburner never touched an e core as e cores were always idle and should have seen a little spike. But instead only p cores were used for that. But sometimes the e cores an important task got stuck on them that was intensive which hurt performance.

Just why oh why does Intel not have a Golden Cove CPU with more than 8 P cores. Do not want 16. Just 10-12 would suffice.

And is AMD really working on Hybrid arch.

I have researched and they seem to have no interest in it in desktop[p space, only mobile.

AMD not interested in big.LITTLE

Or Little and Large AMD's Robert Hallock, Director of Technical Marketing at the company has ruled out AMD copying Intel’s big.LITTLE designs saying he was content with the regular approach of only stacking large cores. Intel introduced the big.LITTLE approach for x86 CPU designing with its 12th...

www.fudzilla.com

 

[mrk]

When did you try it though? During the time when some apps/games did have issues early on?

And what is wrong with 8 P cores if they are excellent as it is (which they are)? There will be higher P core models coming out of course, but there is nothing wrong or performance impacting with current P cores as evidenced by all the review comparing them, and of course those of us who use them for work and play day in day out on Windows 11.

 

[Wolverine2349]

When did you try it though? During the time when some apps/games did have issues early on?

And what is wrong with 8 P cores if they are excellent as it is (which they are)? There will be higher P core models coming out of course, but there is nothing wrong or performance impacting with current P cores as evidenced by all the review comparing them, and of course those of us who use them for work and play day in day out on Windows 11.

A few months ago I tried it when supposedly all issues should have been fixed. Alder Lake will have been out for 8 months now on July 5 so a few months ago is not that long ago.

And topping out at 8 p cores is not good. Even Intel on Comet Lake got up to 10. When are ore P core parts coming out. All the Alder Lake SKUs are 8. All Raptor Lake SKUs in re release show 8 p cores max and only more e cores.

 

[mrk]

Windows 10 or 11? Granted the new architecture is optimised for Windows 11, but 10 still have usable scheduling for it, though 11 is obviously the recommended OS, not just for this but other tech advances too.

 

[Wolverine2349]

Windows 10 or 11? Granted the new architecture is optimised for Windows 11, but 10 still have usable scheduling for it, though 11 is obviously the recommended OS, not just for this but other tech advances too.

Both and both had the same problems.

 

[mrk]

I consider myself a heavy user, and often utilise over 40GB of RAM in my workloads, yet have never seen such issues that you mentioned above. I too use HWINFO64. The ecores get effectively used by background apps as and when needed, and also tapped when doing major tasks like exporting in Lightroom/Photoshop etc. It just seems out of the norm now to hear about such issues since officially they had been addressed many months ago?

 

[Wolverine2349]

I consider myself a heavy user, and often utilise over 40GB of RAM in my workloads, yet have never seen such issues that you mentioned above. I too use HWINFO64. The ecores get effectively used by background apps as and when needed, and also tapped when doing major tasks like exporting in Lightroom/Photoshop etc. It just seems out of the norm now to hear about such issues since officially they had been addressed many months ago?

Do you notice that all cores are parked when not in use on Alder Lake and WIN11. And on WIN10, do you notice it parks all p cores by default when not in use but does not park the e cores?

With e cores disabled in BIOS no cores are parked. Same with any other non- hybrid archs under WIN10 or WIN11 Ultimate Performance Power Plan I have noticed.

 

[mrk]

Mine is set to the balanced power plan on 11, I don't have any Win10 systems but looking at resource Monitor of just normal use (browsers open, media player and everything else running like MSI Afterburner, HWINFO64, Steam etc) this is what I see just leaving the RM window open for a bit:

Thread Director built into the CPU seems to do a perfect job of using whatever core is needed. From what I understand, Windows 11 works in conjunction with it and "learns" your usage from an OS point of view so perhaps some time is needed to get to that stage?

 

[Wolverine2349]

It looks like it does park cores for you. Not sure why it does that on hybrid arch, but not on non-hybrid arch??

Does the hybrid arch need Windows to park cores not in use for the scheduler to utilize them effectively unlike same all core type?? Cause a core can still not be in use and not parked.

 

[LtMatt]

Hard to say for sure, but unlikely anytime soon. 8 cores with SMT/HT is the ideal amount. I would consider a 5800X3D based on your needs and preference for 8 fast cores for gaming.

 

[mrk]

Not sure really, the material I read when looking at the new arch before buying into the upgrade had interviews with Intel techs and some slideshows on how it all works. Thread Director does the bulk of the work working with the OS to schedule/park cores etc and move workloads around depending on use scenario - At least from what I understood from that time. This appears to be the experience I have had too and it seems most others so I guess it's pretty accurate.

Toms Hardware has some detail on how it works btw, the article references Linux's update to support it, but it includes info on how it works with 11 too: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-thread-director-coming-to-linux-5-18

 

[Wolverine2349]

Hard to say for sure, but unlikely anytime soon. 8 cores with SMT/HT is the ideal amount. I would consider a 5800X3D based on your needs and preference for 8 fast cores for gaming.

How is 8 cores 16 thread compared to 8 cores with SMT off. Is SMT useful or not with that high core count? How about with more good cores like on Ryzen 5000? Does SMT ever help even if core count is high or no?

 

[LtMatt]

How is 8 cores 16 thread compared to 8 cores with SMT off. Is SMT useful or not with that high core count? How about with more good cores like on Ryzen 5000? Does SMT ever help even if core count is high or no?

For the most part SMT is useful and should not be disabled. There might be one or two games where if benchmarking for the highest possible score in a CPU limited scenario it is beneficial to disable SMT to eek out an extra FPS or two, but generally over a broad selection of games it helps improve performance a lot more than it hurts.

 

[Wolverine2349]

For the most part SMT is useful and should not be disabled. There might be one or two games where if benchmarking for the highest possible score in a CPU limited scenario it is beneficial to disable SMT to eek out an extra FPS or two, but generally over a broad selection of games it helps improve performance a lot more than it hurts.

Is that true even for games on high core count CPUs? Or then does it not really matter. Like how would SMT help on high core count CPUs for games?

And are real cores much better than logical cores? Like is 12 cores 12 threads far far better than 6 cores 12 threads? I would think so? Though SMT is useful regardless of core count, though still more cores is far superior either way SMT or not?? This of course assuming equal core type architecture and such.

 

[LtMatt]

Is that true even for games on high core count CPUs? Or then does it not really matter. Like how would SMT help on high core count CPUs for games?

And are real cores much better than logical cores? Like is 12 cores 12 threads far far better than 6 cores 12 threads? I would think so? Though ST is useful regardless of core count, though still more cores is far superior either way SMT or not?? This of course assuming equal core type architecture and such.

Most games don't use more than 8 cores, so that's the sweet spot, after that it's diminishing returns for the most part. That won't change anytime soon with the consoles using 8 cores.

To answer your second question yes. However you need to consider the fact that most games don't benefit from more than 8 cores, so there is likely to be very little benefit having more as they will not be utilised in most games

If you are going to be using applications like Blender (or similar) that use more than 8 cores (or as many as you have) as well as gaming, then it would be beneficial to have more cores for that particular use case. It just won't make much if any difference in gaming.

 

[Joxeon]

6 cores is fine though 8 cores adds a bit of headroom, going over 8 may help in the future but by the time 8 cores are not enough the single core speed will be lacking. Imagine a 16 core CPU on zen 1 it would likely not perform much better than an 8 1800X due to the weak single core and would still get blown away by a newer 6 core like the 5600X.

 

[Wolverine2349]

6 cores is fine though 8 cores adds a bit of headroom, going over 8 may help in the future but by the time 8 cores are not enough the single core speed will be lacking. Imagine a 16 core CPU on zen 1 it would likely not perform much better than an 8 1800X due to the weak single core and would still get blown away by a newer 6 core like the 5600X.

Yes true and that is why so many say not to future proof.

Though to be fair, it seems CPU IPC has gotten so fast it may not matter. Those first gen Ryzens had like Haswell IPC with worse latency and lower clock speeds.

But the newer gens IPC really improved so much even Zen 2 from original Zen.

Then Zen 3 was huge. Intel was stuck on Skylake derivatives from 67600K all the way through Comet Lake with minimal IPC gains.

Then they come with Cypress then Golden Cove and Golden Cove had about 19% better.

Though how much better can IPC really get for single threaded. It seems a wall has been hit as both Zen 4 and Raptor Lake only have less than 10% IPC uplift from what I hear.

Though the 1800X and 1600X aged better than the 6700K and 7600K7700K as games started to utilize more cores and threads.

The same may be true with the 5900X over 5800X3D.

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[Joxeon]

Yes true and that is why so many say not to future proof.

Though to be fair, it seems CPU IPC has gotten so fast it may not matter. Those first gen Ryzens had like Haswell IPC with worse latency and lower clock speeds.

But the newer gens IPC really improved so much even Zen 2 from original Zen.

Then Zen 3 was huge. Intel was stuck on Skylake derivatives from 67600K all the way through Comet Lake with minimal IPC gains.

Then they come with Cypress then Golden Cove and Golden Cove had about 19% better.

Though how much better can IPC really get for single threaded. It seems a wall has been hit as both Zen 4 and Raptor Lake only have less than 10% IPC uplift from what I hear.

Though the 1800X and 1600X aged better than the 6700K and 7600K7700K as games started to utilize more cores and threads.

The same may be true with the 5900X over 5800X3D.

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games are still generally fine on 6 cores though so to get from that to 12 cores will take many years.

A modern 6 core should be good for 3 years with an 8 core good for 5, after that the single core speed will be so far behind especially with a newer GPU released 2-3 generations from now that even the extra cores of a 12 core won't really help much.