Do games use AVX?

[ExalyThor]

I made a bet with a friend about my CPU stability. I validated my overclock by running aida64 for 2-3 hours and my system has been rock solid for 3 years for gaming, rendering and decompression, no blue screens. He made me run p95 with avx and my pc crashed in 5 minutes. Obviously my current overclock is not stable for avx workloads, but how often are they encountered?

[RollinLower]

most games don't require AVX, but some games do. I believe a recent example would be Resident Evil Village.

as for why it crashes your otherwise rock solid OC: AVX puts out some serious heat. I believe you can downclock the CPU based on AVX within the BIOS OC settings, but not sure. Saw it once a long time ago.

[porina]

There's AVX and there's Prime95. Prime95 really hits FP64 execution hard, beyond normal user workloads. About the only other uses that are similar to Prime95 are some specialised compute cases like Linpack. So for more typical user AVX workloads you're probably ok.

 

I don't know what Aida does these days, but if you click the "FPU" stress option it probably does something in that area. Cinebench R20 and newer use AVX but not very strongly like Prime95. Y-cruncher is quite different from Prime95 but also benefits a lot from higher tiers of AVX.

 

At the end of the day this type of overclocking is gaining from selective instability. If you never run Prime95, does it matter it is not Prime95 stable, as long as you don't have problems elsewhere.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

55 minutes ago, RollinLower said:

most games don't require AVX, but some games do. I believe a recent example would be Resident Evil Village.

as for why it crashes your otherwise rock solid OC: AVX puts out some serious heat. I believe you can downclock the CPU based on AVX within the BIOS OC settings, but not sure. Saw it once a long time ago.

So if non avx temp is the same as avx temp would that mean the overclock doesnt destabilize under avx load?

[freeagent]

4 hours ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

So if non avx temp is the same as avx temp would that mean the overclock doesnt destabilize under avx load?

AVX will be hotter, that is the reason why AVX offsets were introduced, so people could run higher clocks with sub par cooling. When AVX kicks in it triggers the offset and drops clocks fast. So you would go from running say 5GHz to running 4.7 or so. Whatever your offset was. AVX is pretty heavy..

[ExalyThor]

On 8/31/2022 at 11:58 AM, RollinLower said:

most games don't require AVX, but some games do. I believe a recent example would be Resident Evil Village.

as for why it crashes your otherwise rock solid OC: AVX puts out some serious heat. I believe you can downclock the CPU based on AVX within the BIOS OC settings, but not sure. Saw it once a long time ago.

I'll play RE8 and report back if I encounter any instabilities. I just need a GPU first... Also AVX offset isn't a thing for my Z68 motherboard.

[freeagent]

4 hours ago, ExalyThor said:

Also AVX offset isn't a thing for my Z68 motherboard.

Its not a thing on my Z77 board either. Those Z87 and up guys sure got soft by needing a little cheat like that 

[ExalyThor]

10 minutes ago, freeagent said:

Its not a thing on my Z77 board either. Those Z87 and up guys sure got soft by needing a little cheat like that 

They also cheat overclocking by having the ring bus unlinked to the core!

[porina]

On 8/31/2022 at 2:59 PM, freeagent said:

AVX will be hotter, that is the reason why AVX offsets were introduced, so people could run higher clocks with sub par cooling. When AVX kicks in it triggers the offset and drops clocks fast. So you would go from running say 5GHz to running 4.7 or so. Whatever your offset was. AVX is pretty heavy..

I can't be sure without looking it up again but I think AVX offset was introduced around Kaby Lake. I don't think it was in Skylake. 

 

Also note it is more an Intel thing. Ryzen does it a bit differently in that it has various limiters, so it throttles itself under AVX intensive workloads. It does mean you get the most out of a fixed power limit.

[Ebony Falcon]

3 hours ago, ExalyThor said:

They also cheat overclocking by having the ring bus unlinked to the core!

Haha yeah I ran 5ghz core and 4.5 cache for long time lol 

[Mister Woof]

I know of at least one that did - at least at some point - Destiny 2. It would trigger AVX offset 

[freeagent]

I used X58 for like 9-10 years, then used Z77 for 3 years before trying out AM4. I never did get to see an AVX offset irl

 

Ryzen is good at using its power efficiently, they did a good job with Zen 3 imo. Not the best anymore but still pretty decent

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, freeagent said:

I used X58 for like 9-10 years, then used Z77 for 3 years before trying out AM4. I never did get to see an AVX offset irl

 

Ryzen is good at using its power efficiently, they did a good job with Zen 3 imo. Not the best anymore but still pretty decent

I thought just about all Ryzen processors to be super duper efficient at their base clocks. 

 

But all processors loose efficiency as you increase vcore and frequency, diminishing returns!

[freeagent]

2 hours ago, Guest 5150 said:

But all processors loose efficiency as you increase vcore and frequency, diminishing returns!

You betcha buddy! 

 

5900X @ 260w

 

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, freeagent said:

You betcha buddy! 

 

5900X @ 260w

 

 

You have a system most people desire bro. I envy it myself!

[freeagent]

1 hour ago, Guest 5150 said:

You have a system most people desire bro. I envy it myself!

Nah.. I’m just messing around with the hardware.. I don’t know if I can do more than 260w as I feel I am at the limits of what air can do at this point lol..