How does CPU choice affect gaming when CPU isn't capped?

[Manachanter]

Hi folks, long time lurker but I've been trying to (not?) justify upgrading my 1st gen Ryzen 1800x (3.7GHz) to a 3900x or 3950x. While I can understand that you want the highest possible single core clock speed for gaming, along with a moderate amount of cores, I still wonder how that actually affects modern gaming when you are paired with a decent GPU (2800 Super here).

 

So my 1800x is never ever capped on any core with any game. Even in RDR2 right now it sits around 40% overall with the main thread core possibly reaching 60%, but none are ever capped.

 

I'm seeing all these gaming benchmarks floating around comparing current-gen CPUs (on the same mobo/ram/gpu) and they clearly show a FPS increase as the clock and core count go up, but why is this? None of them are going anywhere near 50% utilisation on any of the cores so why does this matter?

 

Can anyone provide a guide or something that I can read that explains why clock/core count matters for gaming even when not under full load? Thanks!

[MartinKweh]

 the % loading in the CPU is based on the capacity on how much it can handle, not how fast it can handle it.

[amdorintel]

cpu throughput?

right @Martin2132

 

i cant think of the acronym, idp or something.

ah tdp - thats thermal though

 

anyways, how many cores do games really use, and what is the core count games uses for specific games, and what does that achieve. having 10 cores at slow speed vs 6 cores at faster speed all depends on what you really want out of your system and what your system is primarly used for.

[xg32]

 

whether or not it's worth it is up to you, but i vaguely remember the 1st gen ryzens roughly equal to a 2600k overclocked (because of how slow each core ison games that use 4c/8t, that still might be enough depending on your use case. it's very unlikely that all 8 cores would be capped, but zen 1 does bottleneck at 1080p, sometimes 1440p. I tend to look at 1% lows, but the gap between the 3950x and 9700k/9900k is insanely small (assuming ddr3600) that if i was to build a pc now, 3950x would be my choice.

 

Let say i wanna play RDR2 on 144hz, the 3950x has an average that's 20% faster than even the 2700x, that's insane.

[RAM555789]

Its kinda of like RAM. You can have enough RAM that's its not loaded fully, but that doesn't mean its processing it as fast.

[Mister Woof]

1st Gen ryzen is fine for low end gpus at 1080p or mid-range gpus at 1440p, with reasonable frameate.

 

You won't generally get 144+, but it will be perfectly fine for 75+ for the most part.

 

I wouldn't upgrade unless you are specifically chasing high refresh rates.

[KarathKasun]

Also, with how Windows handles threads, you will not really ever see one core pegged at 100%.  It moves threads from core to core faster than the task manager can update.

[KarathKasun]

14 minutes ago, Plutosaurus said:

1st Gen ryzen is fine for low end gpus at 1080p or mid-range gpus at 1440p, with reasonable frameate.

 

You won't generally get 144+, but it will be perfectly fine for 75+ for the most part.

 

I wouldn't upgrade unless you are specifically chasing high refresh rates.

Higher resolution = less CPU demand and more GPU demand.  If the CPU is good for 100fps at 1080p its good for 100fps at 8k.

[Mister Woof]

8 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

Higher resolution = less CPU demand and more GPU demand.  If the CPU is good for 100fps at 1080p its good for 100fps at 8k.

Higher resolution doesn't exactly mean less demand on gpu - it means that generally it's gpu limited instead of cpu limited.

 

Don't try to grab a high end gpu and run it at 1080p expecting 144-240fps on a 1st gen ryzen. Which is why I mentioned lower end gpus at 1080p and mid-range gpus at 1440p, to try to keep it in the <100fps range, which is probably what 1st generation Ryzen is good for.