Gaming with Xeon Processor

[eyalad]

TLDR: 

Shloud i get better reformance with Dual Xeon e5-2623 v4 or with  I7-4470k?

*************

I got my hands on a soon to be discarded computer from work (all legit) that has dual Xeon e5-2623 v4 processors with 64 GB DDR4 ECC memory on it.

Since my gaming PC has a bottelneck with my old core i7-4770K (GPU is 1080ti), i thougt that i can move my 1080TI to the Xeon PC and get some preformance.

I did not.

I used the built in Benchmark in Rise of the Tomb Raider and got ~15% less FPSs

Did i do somthing wrong or Xeon processors are just not built for gaming?

thanks

 

Eyal

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Those chips dont' have a high clock speed, and since there quad cores, your get hit pretty hard with the numa, so that performance seems right here.

 

 

[Levent]

It could be as basic as Xeons having lower single core performance and lower bandwidth ram.

[VectorTech]

3 minutes ago, eyalad said:

TLDR: 

Shloud i get better reformance with Dual Xeon e5-2623 v4 or with  I7-4470k?

*************

I got my hands on a soon to be discarded computer from work (all legit) that has dual Xeon e5-2623 v4 processors with 64 GB DDR4 ECC memory on it.

Since my gaming PC has a bottelneck with my old core i7-4770K (GPU is 1080ti), i thougt that i can move my 1080TI to the Xeon PC and get some preformance.

I did not.

I used the built in Benchmark in Rise of the Tomb Raider and got ~15% less FPSs

Did i do somthing wrong or Xeon processors are just not built for gaming?

thanks

 

Eyal

 

So most games are going to prefer single core performance over have more threads- I would try and OC your 4770k cause you aren't going to get better gaming performance out of dual xeons.

- A dude who used to run dual Xeon E5-2670's.

[Brooksie359]

Dual sockets for gaming is not going to do you any favors for core to core latency so it would make sense that the extra cores wouldn't mean much especially when xeons are known to run at low clock speeds.  

[eyalad]

Thanks everyone for your replys. ill stick with my 4770K

[8-Bit Ninja]

Its not that you cant game on then, but as I'm sure you know Xeon are workstation/server CPU's. This means they typically have higher core count at lower clock speeds, which is great for applications that can utilize a large number of cores. 

 

However games typically don't, even in 2021 a 6 core is all you really need, the core clock of the CPU matters more when comparing your 4770k and e5-2623 for gaming, the max clock of the Xeon is 3.5 ghz, while I'm unsure of your cooling setup its pretty easy to achieve a 4-4.2ghz clock sustained for gaming on a 4770k, which would likely explain your 15% delta.  

[Master Disaster]

2 minutes ago, 8-Bit Ninja said:

Its not that you cant game on then, but as I'm sure you know Xeon are workstation/server CPU's. This means they typically have higher core count at lower clock speeds, which is great for applications that can utilize a large number of cores. 

 

However games typically don't, even in 2021 a 6 core is all you really need, the core clock of the CPU matters more when comparing your 4770k and e5-2623 for gaming, the max clock of the Xeon is 3.5 ghz, while I'm unsure of your cooling setup its pretty easy to achieve a 4-4.2ghz clock sustained for gaming on a 4770k, which would likely explain your 15% delta.  

This is starting to, slowly, change now. Asobo recently demo'd a new MSFS2020 patch thats coming in a few weeks that can make much better use of multithreaded CPUs. Also a few engines have had lots of tweaks or updates to make use of high core systems, namely Unreal 5, Frostbite and Unity. Plus DX12U has a few tweaks to help as well.

 

Unfortunately though, all these things need specific programming by devs to actually do anything so even though they exist right now it'll still be a while before we see them becoming mainstream.

 

Ultimately though, y'all are correct. Games will benefit more from high single core performance than from high core count.

[YoungBlade]

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

This is starting to, slowly, change now. Asobo recently demo'd a new MSFS2020 patch thats coming in a few weeks that can make much better use of multithreaded CPUs. Also a few engines have had lots of tweaks or updates to make use of high core systems, namely Unreal 5, Frostbite and Unity. Plus DX12U has a few tweaks to help as well.

 

Unfortunately though, all these things need specific programming by devs to actually do anything so even though they exist right now it'll still be a while before we see them becoming mainstream.

 

Ultimately though, y'all are correct. Games will benefit more from high single core performance than from high core count.

This is basically what Linus showed in the Skulltrail, 10-Year-Old $5000 PC videos: newer engines like Vulcan can take advantage of multiple cores and allow for smoother gaming on old, dual-socket systems. But in most games, the low single-core performance hurts.