Does "Cache" improve gaming performance at all?

[Yea, i use windows, W]

What is CPU Cache? What is it used for? Does it improve performance? If yes, Then by putting more cache Will it increase gaming performance?

[ausham]

If an APP needs more Cache then yes more Cache will improve performance.

You can think of cache as very high speed ram on the CPU DIE. Its used to store CPU instructions and what not.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

I don't know 100%, but it's like super fast

on cpu ram

[Yea, i use windows, W]

1 minute ago, ausham said:

If an APP needs more Cache then yes more Cache will improve performance.

That didn't answer my questions though

[ausham]

1 minute ago, Yea, i use windows, W said:

That didn't answer my questions though

 

4 minutes ago, Yea, i use windows, W said:

What is CPU Cache? What is it used for? Does it improve performance? If yes, Then by putting more cache Will it increase gaming performance?

it didn't?

[Blademaster91]

I don't know exactly how it works on Ryzen cpu's for example but the CPU cache helps reduce the latency of data going to the cores from the memory controller.

[Yea, i use windows, W]

1 minute ago, ausham said:

 

it didn't?

I mean, it only answered one of them, Soooooooo.....

[ausham]

10 minutes ago, Yea, i use windows, W said:

I mean, it only answered one of them, Soooooooo.....

Soooooo why not wait for someone else to come along and help with the other parts of you question and not quasi insult someone trying to help by stating they did not answer your all your questions.....

 

 

[Lurick]

There is L1 cache which is data the CPU is most likely to need SUPER fast access to

L2 cache is much larger and holds frequently but not as frequently accessed data. Since it's larger it can also hold more data (obviously).

If data isn't found in L1 cache the CPU has to go searching for it so L2 cache is the next step.

If a CPU has L3 cache which is generally larger than L1 or L2 and slower as well then it will go there for the data.

If L4 cache is present it will go there before going to system RAM to look for the data it needs.

 

This article hear breaks it down well:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188776-how-l1-and-l2-cpu-caches-work-and-why-theyre-an-essential-part-of-modern-chips

[Yea, i use windows, W]

1 minute ago, Lurick said:

There is L1 cache which is data the CPU is most likely to need SUPER fast access to

L2 cache is much larger and holds frequently but not as frequently accessed data. Since it's larger it can also hold more data (obviously).

If data isn't found in L1 cache the CPU has to go searching for it so L2 cache is the next step.

If a CPU has L3 cache which is generally larger than L1 or L2 and slower as well then it will go there for the data.

If L4 cache is present it will go there before going to system RAM to look for the data it needs.

 

This article hear breaks it down well:

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/188776-how-l1-and-l2-cpu-caches-work-and-why-theyre-an-essential-part-of-modern-chips

Ah... Thanks!!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Basically cache makes things faster by making it so the program doesn't have to get data from ram. Ram takes much longer than cache to get data, so if a game or program is waiting on data in ram, but it happens to be in the cache aswell, it will complete the operation much faster.

[NineEyeRon]

Cache is usually scaled appropriately to the CPU’s tier, so you won’t find super high end cache specs in a low/mid range CPU, generally the are pretty much as needed for the CPU generation and tier. 
 

I am sure there are some exceptions out there but it’s a very minor consideration, you just have to trust the CPU manufacturers scale them as needed for the CPUs expects audience.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Yea, i use windows, W said:

Ah... Thanks!!

So... I didn't quite get it, does more cache imorove game performance or no?

 

 

[ausham]

5 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

So... I didn't quite get it, does more cache imorove game performance or no?

 

 

depends on the game and how much cache and the speed of witch you are comparing .

[straight_stewie]

Caching is, complicated. To say the least. It's easy enough to understand the very basics of what a CPU cache is. Understanding how it really works is fairly hard, predicting whether or not it will actually improve performance for a given application is next to impossible.

What I can tell you is that, for a well designed cache and cache policy, having a cache will improve performance over having no cache at all for most data bound tasks. Having a larger cache or a better cache policy can improve performance even further.

However, having a cache is unlikely to improve performance much for most IO bound tasks. Which is where things get difficult for games specifically: Games are generally both data and IO bound. So predicting whether more cache equals more better is, well, next to impossible without some serious, in-depth, application specific analysis.

 

My suggestion is: Don't worry about how much cache a processor has when you are shopping. Modern processors are pretty well built, and generally fit nicely into their performance categories.

[ryao]

2 hours ago, Yea, i use windows, W said:

What is CPU Cache? What is it used for? Does it improve performance? If yes, Then by putting more cache Will it increase gaming performance?

Without cache, CPUs would probably be an order of magnitude slower. The cache is needed to workaround the Von Neumann bottleneck:

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/14630/von-neumann-bottleneck

It does help games. More cache generally does improve performance because it can increase the hit rate for cache. "Optimal" performance would be from having a 100% cache hitrate (or arbitrarily close to it given that a small number misses are necessary to fill cache), but optimality is not feasible. As for whether a better hit rate would translate into a better framerate in a game, that depends on whether the GPU has any headroom to take new work scheduled by the CPU.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

4 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

So... I didn't quite get it, does more cache imorove game performance or no?

 

 

Past a certain threshold, I wouldn't expect much improvement. We haven't gotten to the point where you have so much cache, that you can literally start dumping into it large chunks of data you otherwise would've used RAM to store. Obviously if you have too little cache like what often happened with older Intel Celeron processors (those had almost no cache at all), you're going to run into issues. But nowadays, most processes you buy for gaming like an Intel Core series or Ryzen chip will have enough onchip cache so things run smoothly. 

[LogicalDrm]

-> Moved to CPUs, Motherboards and Memory