AMD Ryzen Gaming, What's More Important: CPU Cores or Cache?

[@DragonOfTheMortalKombat]

The one thing that improves gaming performance for sure is more Cash.

[@Trip4man]

Nope... Because there are components that are extra costly and don't provide that much performance. And in fact, cheaper components can provide as much performance as pricier ones. So it's actually more about Finding the Best Value than just simply blindly go buy the pricier things.

[@commandertoothpick8284]

@@Trip4man someone didnt get the joke

[@TheDarksideFNothing]

​@@Trip4man"uhm akshyually" lol. It was a good joke the dude made. Sure, you're right, it's not always true that spending more equals greater perf. But on average, for most people, increasing budget will allow for better performance.... And the joke was funny! So chill lmao

[@Jakiyyyyy]

You want more Cache, I want more Cash. We are not the same.

[@Somebody374-bv8cd]

More cache: This does not spark joy. More cash: This sparks joy.

[@Kossmok]

I just upgraded to 5800x3d from my old 2700x.I see about 30% performance gain in average FPS with my 6700XT, and the stuttering, frame time spikes are all gone, I can finally enjoy fluid gaming in most of the games.

[@tommihommi1]

it really is amazing how much of a difference going from a 3600 to a 5800x3d made, even while using a measly RX480 and technically "gpu bound" 99% of the time. Those moments when the CPU slogs you down really ruin gaming fun

[@fracturedlife1393]

30% sounds low, maybe lower some settings if playing anything competitive. I went 38xt to 58x3d, I was CPU limited in ACC and EPIC graphics settings everywhere didn't impact max / average FPS much. Dialled back some settings that are pretty useless when playing and almost doubled FPS at race starts, average 50% higher overall.

[@bigjoeangel]

I went from a 2700x to a 5600 on a Radeon 6700 10G and even losing two cores I still get massive performance gains.

[@Kossmok]

@@fracturedlife1393 competetive games will see larger gains, Elden Ring maxed at 1440p just got smooth frame pacing now :)

[@sannidhyabalkote9536]

​@@fracturedlife1393 from cpu bound to gpu bound :)

[@Fantomas24ARM]

AMD has hit a jackpot with it's 3D V-Cache technology.

[@Breakfast_of_Champions]

Intel only did it as a one-off with the 5775C, never followed up on it.

[@TheDarksideFNothing]

Isn't it great that V-Cache was just a skunk works for funsies thing one of their engineers cooked up? Wasn't even really in the plans until the prototype was super impressive. Info from someone's AMD tour... Maybe LTT? Gamers Nexus? I can't remember now

[@PhillipLemmon]

Yeah but they also hit a wall with it..... Which is why they are putting it in EVERYTHING now. Cuz they know that AI chip ain't shit, LMFAO!!!

[@winterscrescendo]

@@TheDarksideFNothing That was Gamers Nexus. Interestingly, Threadripper has a similar origin story. AMD seems to have a company culture that lets their engineers experiment a bit and it's paid off for them greatly.

[@catsspat]

@@Breakfast_of_Championsi7-5775C's technology isn't even close. That is an L4 eDRAM cache attached on the side. Not only is eDRAM much slower than SRAM, it's just a standard MCM (side-by-side) module attached through a standard bus. The incredible magic of 3D V-Cache is that it adds practically no additional latency, because it's literally right there, where the regular L3 cache logic is. Any company can make a giant chip with more L3 cache, but that will lead to additional latencies (bigger == further away), and cost more due to sinking yield.

[@theglobol]

I love these kinds of comparisons. Thank you for doing them.

[@ScottOmatic]

As someone who plays a lot simulation type games, I am continually grateful that you included Assetto Corsa Competizone in your testing suite. For people that primarily play racing sims, flight sims, and large scale military sims, like ARMA, testing and comparing CPU cache as well as core count is integral to find out what hardware is the best choice for these kinds of titles. The way these games operate is so greatly different than most other games, mostly being console ports with not a lot of instruction sets being sent to the CPU in comparison.

[@zJericho101z]

It's allways worth revisiting these types of subjects if only to help newbies learn more about the machines they are buying. Also updated / expanded testing data is allways good.

[@QuentinStephens]

When I saw the title I thought, "Haven't you already done this with Intel?" I wonder what would happen if you took the 64 core or 96 core Threadripper and disabled all but 8 cores. Would that give those 8 cores 384 MB of L3 cache?

[@cant_Comment]

peopIe should upvote this so hardwareunboxed sees it and tries it out

[@MLWJ1993]

Depends on the layout if that's beneficial or not. Accessing cache on a different CCD induces a hefty latency penalty that would reduce performance in most instances.

[@cant_Comment]

@@MLWJ1993 is that latency penalty worth it over the latency penalty of having to access RAM?

[@MrHamof]

@@cant_CommentGo check out the 7950x review, look at it's scores compared to the 7700x. The answer is no. It's at best equal, in some cases worse.

[@anttikangasvieri1361]

​@@cant_Commentprobably, ram access penalty is hundreds of clocks.

[@jrherita]

Funny we forgot the lessons learned during the Core 2 Duo and Quad era. The extra cache on Penryn vs Conroe (especially 2M Conroe) mattered more than the # of cores for gaming

[@user-lp5wb2rb3v]

yep, this is why a eon with lots of chache is still relevant

[@saricubra2867]

Then Intel Ring Bus came on Sandy Bridge and made a huge improvement in perfomance.

[@FeelingPoyChina]

cores = muscles cache = oxygen

[@71janas]

Spot on 👍

[@LikkleleeUK]

great analogy!

[@fracturedlife1393]

Ha classic. Cores=allnattymuscles Cache=steroids

[@weltsiebenhundert]

VRAM = ???

[@igoresque]

More like cache=blood vessels

[@sivu2048]

Excel, browser and other productivity applications' impact on core frequency, ipc and cache will be much appreciated as most of the day to day tasks are still single threaded

[@antgib]

Yes, I'd be very interested to see all the same CPU's tested against general apps/productivity. Especially as the much larger cache on the X3D chips usually results in lower frequency, which in theory matters more outside of games, but it would be nice to see all that confirmed.

[@Diegonando64]

3D cache also improves winRAR performance a lot, because the dictionary fits inside cache and the processor won´t go to main memory frequently.

[@FateXO]

7zip better

[@Diegonando64]

@@FateXO i'm excited about zstd and FSE-related compressors

[@Dankyjrthethird]

@@FateXO You’re pushing your luck little man.

[@FateXO]

@@Dankyjrthethird what you finna do about it old timer

[@carllavery4442]

I actually upgraded from the 5700G to the 5800X3D last year and it'd one of the best PC components I've ever bought

[@carllavery4442]

@tilapiadave3234 nonsense

[@IceBreakBottle]

@@tilapiadave3234 That's why AMD is dominating the CPU market now...

[@LupusAries]

​@@tilapiadave3234given that in Germany you can get one for 277 Euros while the 5700X3D is 253..... nope!

[@ThEoNeAnDoNlYmE0]

@@tilapiadave3234said no one ever

[@montreauxs]

yep @@LupusAries

[@gamingoptimized]

Cache itself is important, but it depends on how accessible it is to all the CPU's cores. If you have 20mb of cache but a core can access only 1/8th of it, its far worse than if one core can access all of the cache. That's basically why zen 3 is so much faster than zen 2. A core can access twice as much cache on zen 3 compared to zen 2

[@Syssn3ck]

This here is about L3-Cache that is shared between all cores. But yeah L1/L2-Cashes also matter but are not easily comparable, because they are usually the same for the same architecture. And when comparing between two different architectures, there are more factors than just L1/L2 that are responsible for the performance gain.

[@cpt.tombstone]

Generally speaking, only L1-I and L1-D caches are private in modern CPU architectures. L2 cache is "on the core" meaning it's physically allocated to each core, but other cores can "snoop" L2 caches of other cores. With Zen, this can only happen inside a CCD, so Core 0 (on CCD 0) cannot access the L2 cache of Core 8 (on CCD 1). This is partly why multi CCD Zen chips are not better in games. L3 cache is again CCD-public, meaning any core on the same CCD can access the L3 cache, but other CCDs cannot. As you mentioned, with Zen 2, a CCD was 4-cores and a CCX contained 2 CCDs. With Zen 3, Zen 4 and Zen 4c, a CCD is 8 cores.

[@JackJohnson-br4qr]

A good example for Zen 2 is Ryzen 5 3600 vs Ryzen 7 3700X. The Ryzen 5 3600 has 32MB of shared L3 cache between cores and the other one does not. But the difference in performance is only 5%. But that can be attributed to more cores and a higher frequency rather than a difference in cache. People have learned that the cache makes a big difference in Zen 3, but then they try to apply it retroactively to older architectures as well. I don't think Zen 2 was designed to benefit significantly from more cache.

[@gamingoptimized]

@@JackJohnson-br4qr the cache on zen 2 was shared between 4 cores, thus an 8 core 3700x did have 32mb of cache but each 4 core CCD could access 16mb. That changed with zen 3 where each core had access to the 32mb of cache as there is no CCD anymore

[@h1tzzYT]

@@cpt.tombstone except that dual ccd chips are faster in games, not by much with varying results, but in general they are the same or faster than single CCD chips

[@iansrven3023]

very interesting, will be installing 5700X3D tomorrow from 3500X, my wife's PC ended up being a good upgrade path from 8700K PC.

[@adi22121]

upgraded my 3700x to 5700x3d and i'm loving it. the 3700x was great for its price back in the day, but the 5700x3d is just amazing

[@narutonagato95]

even from 5600 to 5700X3D i felt the game more smooth especially in CS2

[@Ziontrainism]

This was one of the most informative CPU videos I've ever seen. Good job making great content in a time where there isn't much happening as far as new parts.

[@tomsun3159]

Another dimension to check is Cache Size vs. ClockFrequency with similar corecount, as 3DVCache is usually lower clocked as standard Cache-CPUs

[@PaulSpades]

At this point, all desktop cpus run at outrageously high (inefficient) clock rates. Everything over 3ghz is mostly a waste of power. Look at gpu clock rates.

[@nicholaswicks3077]

@@PaulSpadeslooks over at my 6.3 ghz 14900k pc 👁️👄👁️

[@pizzaparity]

@@PaulSpadeswhy is that?

[@Eidolon2003]

@@PaulSpades Performance scales with clock speed far past 3 GHz, what are you even talking about?

[@impuls60]

@@Eidolon2003 Agreed, this whole test is done on cpu's starved of ram info throughput. Zen2/3 have high latency to ram and ofcourse a cache buffer will diminish that problem somewhat. On Intel one can oc ring and cache for over 6Ghz scaling. This has been true for over 10years on Intel. Only HW likes to pretend this isnt doable on Intel, rofl. On Intel no oc guy leaves ring and cache on stock speed when oc'ing.

[@romzen]

I was running Intel for at least 4 of my last builds and was about to go for the 14700k a week ago. Then I stumbled over some information on the lifecycle and the fact that AM5 would be more future proof for another couple of years while being superior for gaming anyway due to the cache. And then I also noticed that the R7 7800X3D also was way more efficient and cooler. All that while costing less in total together with an Aorus Master mainboard. Had to reconfigure my cart eventually and go with AMD of course. Super glad right now.

[@michealmeyers9789]

I was on intel for a decade. My last build was 5800x3d, very efficient never regret will last at least 5 more years.

[@johnfirst3986]

hi planing also to buy 7800x3d AMD path, can you share me your build list ? thanks and have a nice day

[@romzen]

@@johnfirst3986 I went with - Corsair 7000D Airflow (Big Tower) white - Aorus Master B650E (Mainboard) - 7800X3D (of course) cooled by Noctua NH-D15 - Corsair Vengeance RGB 32GB CL30 AMD EXPO (RAM) - Corsair RM850x (PSU) - MSI GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16G Gaming X Slim White (GPU) I had plenty of storage left from my older machine. And I game at 1440p for the most part. The build is overkill for what I need as I mostly play fighting games. Even the most recent games will not need the 4080 to consume more than 50 watts.

[@katzicael]

Love the blowing up of the "More cores/multi-tasking!" argument points. Well done guys.

[@Incommensurabilities]

it's quite surprising to me, but good to know!

[@awebuser5914]

It's been implied by testing, but L2 cache is incredibly important as well, arguably with more impact. Raptor Lake's performance improvements are almost entirely based on in a large increases in L2 cache (not all 13th gen did get L2 cache increases, basically it's 13600K+). The nVidia Lovelace architecture also saw massive gains by increasing L2 cache sizes. At a basic level, L2 cache is "easier" and less expensive to implement than stacked dies.

[@TheDarksideFNothing]

L2 just has less options for blowing up majorly in size. I think even the latency of V-Cache would be too great for L2 IIRC Would be interesting if they figured a way to use all the L3 space on the die for L2 and then use V-Cache only for L3. Best of both worlds.

[@awebuser5914]

@@TheDarksideFNothing "L2 just has less options for blowing up majorly in size..." The "problem" is that L3 size has significantly diminishing returns in performance gains. You could probably cut the L3 (per core) in half on an X3D chip and see very similar results.

[@kosmosyche]

@@awebuser5914 You are probably right about diminishing returns, but I wonder if the relative ceiling of L3 cache effectiveness on Ryzens has even been reached yet. Right now it's obvious that 96MB is much better than 32MB (for games), but what if they tried 128MB, 160MB or even 192MB of V-Cache? 😁

[@WayStedYou]

They wouldn't just because of expense. It may even be better to just tack another 32mb on instead of 64mb​@kosmosyche

[@JonWood007]

No, Steve did a comparison on that. Most of it is clock speed and RAM speed, the difference in L2 cache is like 1 frame.

[@AnthonyTeasdale]

Cache is King.

[@George_K.]

Content is King, too!

[@BBB-999]

Well I’d like both

[@Alex-qq1gm]

Wu Tang said it first. Cache Rules Everything Around Me.

[@beachslap7359]

When it can be utilized yeah, but a brute force single core combined with low latency is more consistent in its results. That's why I'm interested to see how arrow lake pans out considering Intel is ditching hyperthreading for the sake of single core performance.

[@HNedel]

@ZaHandlesome did 😊

[@skilletpan5674]

Core count and mhz are linked. High cache is about removing latency issues. If your cores or high mhz cpu is waiting for a chunk of ram from system ram the it dosn't matter if you have 6 or 7ghz cpu. It will be idle. A high cache helps to mitigate this issue by guessing what you might want to load in the future and keep it closer. The P4 tried to do this but their long pipeline killed the gains from the cache. The P4 had to flush the long pipelines and it took a long time.

[@QuantumS1ngularity]

I will be forever thankful to you guys for the review of the 5800X3D almost 2 years ago. If it wasn't for your benchmark with ACC i probably wouldn't have jumped on the X3D train and wouldn't have experienced the monster that this chip is. 18 months plus and counting and still feel completely blown away by the performance every time i load a game.

[@HazewinDog]

It's a shame no one ever tested it with the original AC (+ CSP). I only recently decided to make the jump to X3D, upgrading from the 3700X to the 5800X3D. and my goodness was I not prepared for the difference. I legitimately get up to 105% higher framerate. Yes, over twice the framerate. And that's with a 4060 Ti, so the potential gains with a higher end GPU can probably be much higher still. X3D is such a blessing in many CPU-heavy titles.

[@roblyc632]

I had a 5900x 12 core and changed to a 7800x3d 8 core and don't regret it for gaming now.

[@DungxxHen]

Did you get 5900x for gaming?

[@Jakiyyyyy]

Does that mean cache are more important than cores?

[@Mario211DE]

I still have my 5900x and now waiting for the Zen5. Gaming in 4k and streaming at the same time

[@DungxxHen]

@@Mario211DE I don't think you need to upgrade

[@Mario211DE]

@@DungxxHen thing is tho im cpu bound even at 4k in different games already which is interesting

[@GewelReal]

To me bigger difference would be cache vs frequency I am using X99 based Xeons and some games benefit so much from cache that it doubles my framerate despite running

[@WereCatStudio]

Just look at 5700X3D vs 5800X3D reviews. They are almost the same perf while 5700X3D runs by around 400MHz-500MHz slower.

[@HazewinDog]

good call to be honest. we already know 12 threads is more than enough, but frequency VS cache is a whole different animal, as some games will heavily favor frequency, whereas others will heavily favor cache.

[@AdalbertSchneider_]

3:10 wow, dictator Steve :D:D:D But hey, you are good dictator ! :D

[@danield.8615]

That's why I love you guys from down under. You're making videos to topics or questions the viewers would like to get answered. 👌👍

[@8ulleTin]

You need to test competitive games like a BF, COD, APEX, PUBG. It is for them that people upgrade their CPU\RAM in the first place.

[@tomstech4390]

12600k alderlake vs 14400 "raptor lake refresh" Lock the cores and caches to the same frequency (and tdp's) and see if there's any change in architecture... because they're the same die.

[@matttiaz7576]

I always follow the suggestion/raccomandation from Steve and Tim , NEVER let me down !! CPU , GPU , Monitors , I based my purchases on this channel , I did NEVER regret ANY decision. They are the best IMO.

[@ELCrisler]

The other thing not mentioned is that cache can help vs clock speed. The 5800X and 5600X chips both have higher clocks and yet are showing some serious performance difference in gaming.

[@deezayum]

Just got my 5800x3d a few days ago. 🥳 Long live AM4

[@jmal]

AM4ever!

[@HazewinDog]

AM4 is going to beat LGA1155 in terms of usable lifespan :)

[@GodyArtDesign]

Maybe we are Lucky And they will bring a other New cpu with x3d for am4

[@DaveOfRock]

Super useful video, as always! Thanks Steve!

[@wirdanrafi]

Just let 5600X3D sell worldwide already !!!

[@GENKI_INU]

What about L2 and L1 cache size?

[@Rob1972Gem]

I use a AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with 64 MB of L3 cache along with 32 GB of DDR4 running at 3200 and i never feel it need more it runs every game and application i use with NO problems hopefully it will keep going for a few more years yet

[@maxwellsmart3156]

Multitasking requires the CPU cores to share the rest of the memory and storage subsystems and therefore increases latency and latency dependent games will suffer regardless of core count. That's why the E-cores on ADL and RPL taking care of all the background tasks is somewhat of a fallacy.

[@andersjjensen]

Yeah. For that argument to ever have any merit we will need quad channel memory on the consumer platform.

[@saricubra2867]

"That's why the E-cores on ADL and RPL taking care of all the background tasks is somewhat of a fallacy." Better scheduling fixes software CPU overhead, that's why my 12700K is perfect for a DAW and chips without Big-Little aren't that good. What Steve shows in bars doesn't reflect the real world when actually using these types of CPUs, same for a lot of results i watched on the internet when these techtubers are ignoring music producers. When i disable the e-cores on the i7, i lose singlethread speed and gaming perfomance even though I'm freeing cache for the big cores. Depending on the game, it could be a hit to the frametimes (a small one with some exceptions).

[@saricubra2867]

When the scheduling works perfectly, we get a massive 30% increase for gaming perfomance (watch APO on the 14900K as an example). Cache and memory aren't everything. Imagine how much better the Ryzen 7 1700 would have been at launch if the scheduling worked fine, nowadays it outperforms quad core i7s from that time due to the lack of cores. Simply search which CPUs have the highest IPC, singlethread speeds and thread counts, the rest is irrelevant (minus number of PCIe lanes).

[@donematt1862]

Chiplet vs monolithic would also be interesting

[@curious_ember]

just went from a 6700k to a 7800x3d.. can only say good things omg has the frame stability been nice

[@gamingbros8472]

So 6 cores are fine with just gaming and more cache would be usually better . How does it hold up when u also streaming from the same pc? Would a cpu with more cores then be better, or a cpu with less cores but more cache? Dunno if this a yes or no question or 'it depends' :P

[@vladislavkaras491]

Really impressive how big changes are in fps and how much L3 cache has changed over years! Thanks for the benchmarks!

[@evanjames93]

Can we see a cache vs clock speed video? How much do the non 3D skus make up in performance with their clock speed increase over the 3D variants? Only a curiosity of mine because I moved from 7600x at 5.5ghz to a 7800x3d at around 4.6 ghz.

[@TheBenMillard]

In these charts, the 5800X has faster clocks than the 5800X3D. The 5600X has faster clocks than the 5600X3D. In simple games, faster cores can be an advantage because those games don't fill the 'normal' cache sizes. (Anything in a modern engine like UE4 will be more complicated than this.) Productivity workloads are often spamming a small set of instructions on a large amount of unique data. Cores and clocks help those more than cache - if the task can be spread across cores, that is. Conversely, going from a 5000 CPU to a 7000 CPU is a change of architecture and memory goes from DDR4 to DDR5. The also doubled the L2 cache on each core. ~15% more instructions per cycle in each core and more memory bandwidth alone should give ~30% more performance for the same clock+core+L3 cache configuration. 7800X3D should boost up to 5050MHz per core. Have a read about PBO, curve optimiser and the +200MHz "Boost Clock" setting your motherboard BIOS should have. Task Manager might not report the full clock speed you are getting. HWinfo and similar tools will show it. If your motherboard has an external clock generator, ScatterBench has an article about overclocking X3D a bit. It may even have a built-in, pre-tuned overclocked profile.

[@vulcan4d]

If this was rerun on a 4070 super the 6/8 core and cache vs less cache would be very similar. Cache is needed for the 4090.

[@OtherwiseUknownMonkey]

i really want to see a 1gb cache one day lmao you could cram a whole old game in there

[@TheDarksideFNothing]

Hell even a modern game you could fit enough of it in there to easily mask any data swapping. We already see where some games see no benefit because they've already optimized to fit in normal amounts of cache so at some point you lose the benefits. But I do wonder if a dev KNEW they were getting 1GB if they'd be able to take advantage of it in really interesting ways.

[@OtherwiseUknownMonkey]

Yeah the one thing I keep wondering about how one could optimize if they knew they were getting 1gb of cache. i personally wonder if it would help raytracing performance at all since that hits performance the hardest@@TheDarksideFNothing

[@TheDarksideFNothing]

@@OtherwiseUknownMonkey Yeah, I think a full GB of cache would be much more about seeing what new things you could do vs making existing things go faster. Right now all things are designed around small caches because that's the hardware that exists in mainstream. But some applications miss the mark, and that's where V-Cache shines.

[@kingkrrrraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa4527]

Intel is apparently working on a last level cache that goes up to 8GB.

[@OtherwiseUknownMonkey]

@@TheDarksideFNothing i wish i could hear a tech artist talk and a programmer talk on it, with 1gb cache on cpu you could make worlds feel so much more lively eith more intricate ai routines i imagine, and if you had a gig of cache on the gpu you could keep whole lightmaps in there, like lets say the game let the gpu know where the lighting will be at in 10 seconds from now and you could smartly interpolate those lightmaps that will still be in cache the whole time making rendering sm faster

[@ViralWatchMedia]

The 3D V-cache absolutely makes a different in frametimes too, I went from the 5800X to the 5800X 3D and the caching stutters went away, I was getting insane shader cache stutters on the regular 5800X and they were non existent on the 3D version, this is after a full driver install and the cache cleared.

[@neilparker-smith7554]

"Why am I doing this. Because I want to ". At this point, the video gets a like. Because I want to 😊

[@natr0n]

Greatly put together. I was curious about cache vs core count and this video explained it well.

[@HimerosTeviot]

_Ca$h really is king._

[@cobrakainevereverdies6940]

*ABSOLUTE GENIUS WORK* As a geeky request, if you can compare the 7000 series x3d models. Please

[@QuaK3RRR]

what is the difference if u just play esport games with low settings ans in cpu limit, lets say games like cs2, valorant and so on???

[@SJJuicin1]

I'd like to know this

[@Dechno1337]

Should be the same as with these tested games. CS2 (and Fortnite I think) seem to scale very well with cache. Not sure about Valorant though.

[@Vanzee9001]

watch his older video comparing 5800x to 5800x3d spoiler alert: it's the same, more cache = more fps

[@defeqel6537]

really depends on the game, if all game data already fits in the smaller L3, then no improvement is seen, if not, then improvement is seen with more cache

[@billwhoever2830]

Something that has to be noted is that cache architecture is far more complex than just adding more even if it's possible, the corecount, the cores, the task and the L1 and L2 caches affect how much L3 is optimal. In general a larger cache is slower so there is an optimal value for the cache for each task. Slower cache means it takes longer to access it but it means you have to access the even slower RAM less often. If your task has very little memory requirements (takes very little ram space) then a cpu with larger L3 can actually become slower. Games get heavier and heavier so we might get L4 cache soon in the form of HBM on the chip and the L3 caches might get smaller.

[@NostradAlex]

Please don't tell me techdeals decided to go on his rants that you need all the cores just to start the pc otherwise you're doing it wrong.

[@tomstech4390]

"who cares how expensive and rtx 3090 is.. just take out a mortgage and buy one because itll pay for itself" [mining crashes]

[@NickVu1]

Although I generaly agree, keep always in mind that these benchmarkes we see here are in a vacum, meaning that the system is clean running minimal to no other applications, deactivated windows sheningans etc. Does that mean that if we had Disc, 20 tabs in a browser and windows updating and running av check the results would defer greatly? Ofc not, but it depends on what someone might be using, as well as a futureproofing aspect in case the buying choice was at the latest gen in the first place

[@RobBCactive]

There'll still be people thinking mostly idle background tasks need cores in reserve, despite uniprocessors multitasking for decades. I guess people who wasted money on mooaaaaahhhhhhhhrrrrrrrrr cores suffer cognitive dissonance, so dismiss all the data.

[@pR0ManiacS]

​@@NickVu1who the fuck does benchmarks like that btw ???

[@anttikangasvieri1361]

​@@RobBCactivecertainly a case of "I paid for all the cores, I am going to feel smug for all the cores."

[@EhNothing]

Really fantastic video! Great information, great data presentation, and very educational for buyers. Thanks Steve!

[@therealad1238]

A few certain KZbinrs aren't going to like this one...

[@mukkah]

Thanks for doing a video you found interesting to do and that's why ya did it ^^ Found it intereresting too, for sure =) ~a random canadian viewer

[@axescar]

Thank you! I'd rather add as optional opponents 4600g and 4700g. They have only zen2 cores but twice less L3 when compare to 5xxxG parts, so L3 compare chain can be wider - from 8 to 96MB :)

[@kasimirdenhertog3516]

It would be interesting to do a deep dive into this subject and trace the CPU operations to see how many times L3 cache is hit and how many times main memory during gaming. That would give you conclusive information.

[@minigator2]

I was just wondering about this with my brother yesterday, thank you for the explanation!

[@gloth]

To be honest, after the release & reviews of the X3D cpus we kinda already knew those results. Steve you are an absolute legend mate.... I was honestly just writing "What would be an interesting, but also almost impossible to accurate measure, is the number of cores that start to make a difference when playing games in a more real life example and not in a benchmarking environment. So, basically, what happens when you play a game on a windows pc that is not a clean installation to get accurate results for the hardware you test, but when you have youtube, discord, motherboard/peripheral background software, various tabs on a browser open, etc"... And I see you 've already covered this on 15:00

[@Dazzxp]

This was why i upgraded from a 3900X to a 5800x3D, despite the core deficit i mostly play games but also i wanted a single CCX 1x8 rather than 4x3 core because of the cross-talk between cores over the infinity fabric and accessing the cache. Still using an RTX2080 so while over all fps has not changed much (GPU limit) but my 1% lows has been reduced by over 50%. Also games don't like too many CPU cores as it messes up the scheduling which epic has came out about crashes on Intel CPU's because of core count.

[@Freddie1980]

If anything this really highlights the impact of swapping data in and out of system ram has on overall performance.

[@djhillesq]

You guys always seem to make videos answering questions I've wanted to know the answers to. Cheers!

[@crashbug4343]

Cash is indeed king XD.. AMD really struck gold with 3d vcache.. would be interesting to interview a cpu engineer to understand more about how the increased cache helps

[@cks2020693]

Cache is pretty much a dedicated mega fast RAM for the CPU, it's about 100 times faster than your actual RAM; until RAM technology catches up to that speed, X3D will stay dominant as the go-to gaming CPUs

[@MrAlexander100]

Are you going to do another video on CPU scaling with high end GPUs at all the resolutions ?

[@deezayum]

Can you guys test the difference in frame timings between X3D cpus and intel cpus? Just curious.

[@Morkail321]

oh wow this is a subject ive been wondering about for awhile thanks for the video

[@TheXev]

I remember many hears ago buying a used Opteron X2 170 for gaming. It had one more core and a boat load more cache then it's Athlon 64 equivalent, and even being 200Mhz slower it out gamed pretty much any Athlon 64 because of the added cache. I was also able to sink a 1Ghz overclock on that bad boy and REALLY crank out the performance.. good times.

[@yarost12]

Kinda shows how I/O bound CPUs are. You can go from dirt cheap sticks to premium ones and get 10% more performance, but add a few dozen mb of cache and you get huge boosts. Hopefully DDR ram is gonna die soon and we'll see something groundbreaking-ly fast. Modern CPUs need that. Also interested in Zen 4 version of these tests, those have doubled the L2 cache comapred to Zen 3.

[@uss-dh7909]

Wild idea. Imagine getting RAM onboard the CPU and cutting out those slots entirety. I'm sure the skus would explode and that would lead to an overall increase in size and heat concentration, and of course less RGB performance, but it does make me wonder.

[@jhaluska80]

I appreciate your no nonsense video titles.

[@MehKore]

Would be great if you could add some multiplayer titles / competitive games to these charts. Those likely scale much less with cache, since they don't have the huge amount of game world managers, AI NPCs and such that the singleplayer games you test have. (not sure how the rainbow six benchmark compares btw) For testing those, for example cs2 and overwatch2 have the demo/replay system, so you'd only need to play one match, then compare whether the FPS in the replay are similar to the real match and then you can run the tests on the replay = repeatable test. There's obviously still issues like the games not allowing you to watch old replays on a new patch f.e. I mainly find it very hard to judge how relevant results shown in these videos are to people who mostly play multiplayer titles.

[@icekuba]

Great but what about 4k gaming is there any differents?

[@Dylan_Shaw]

Been saying this since Intel's mesh architecture (I had a 7820x), so it's great seeing more and more videos confirm cache is so important! Great video.

[@UncannySense]

I have the 5700G but I'm also running 4k resolution. I understand the 1080p testing reasons but it would be nice to see other resolutions even if it was for just 1 bar graph chart...I am fairly certain there's little to no fps difference between a 5700 and 5800x3d at 4k

[@Syssn3ck]

Depends on your graphics card of course. The 4090 will be CPU-limited in 4k with a 5700, not sure how much though.

[@UncannySense]

@@Syssn3ck true i'm using an RX6800 which plays my games at 4k 60fps no issue. I have no interest in owning a 4090 for 1080p either...

[@blackraen]

These are CPU tests, that's why there's no 4k -- We're trying to see what the CPUs are capable of doing. At 4k, you're just benchmarking the GPU. Keep in mind these tests are for comparison purposes of the specific components, and not intended as a "This is the performance you can expect" sort of review content.

[@MaxUmbra]

Really great idea for a video Very helpful definitely 🙏🏻 Love the content like always

[@elham7459]

Would be nice data addition if all CPUs limited to certain clockspeed even if only tested in few game benchmarks.

[@bennyybingbong]

Love this channel. Exponentially increases my enjoyment for pc tech and gaming.

[@MrExino]

Hey Steve, This was a great video, I was just looking into 5800X3D as a potential upgrade path as it does seem to regularly get discounts here in the EU. I am kind of curious how it would compare against one of the 12/16-core SKUs though. All of these have 64MB L3 cache, but boost higher and are generally better value than X3Ds for productivity. I'd imagine many of us also use their "gaming" PCs as a workstation, so I wonder if the gaming performance gain is significant enough to justify a 5800X3D vs. 5900x for example. In your original review the average 8-game 1% lows came up to 150 vs. 121 FPS respectively, but the X3D got blown away in all productivity tests. What I don't get is why the 64MB L3 cache on the 5900X/5950X did not seem to make any difference in these tests vs. the non-X3D 5800X (32MB cache). The way I understand it, the 64MB should be shared between both CCDs (as opposed to 32MB per CCD), so even if games don't use multiple cores, shouldn't they still benefit from the larger cache size?

[@joshsousa1090]

This and the x3d comparison was super helpful!

[@Texshy]

With how a lot of CPU heavy games DON'T have multi-core support, it looks like the emphasis on cache is a better idea. While not optimized well in the first place, the X3D CPU's have been a blessing for Ryzen users who play Squad.

[@andersjjensen]

The "problem" with games is that each frame is a down-render of a specific point on a time line. This means that the synchronisation thread will always be the bottleneck. A tile based renderer doesn't give a rats arse about what happens if one thread finishes before another. It will just keep piling jobs on any available core until there are no more jobs. A game cares very much about exactly where each individual animation is at exactly the moment when it's time to freeze everything, down-render the geometry and dispatch it to the GPU. I'm not saying games are the epitome of hardcore optimisation, as we get plenty of examples where a new game has less going on than some other older title, yet still hogs CPU power much worse. But I am saying that at the fundamental level there is a hard limit to how well you can make a game utilize asynchronous batch processing without the synchronisation thread becoming overwhelmed.

[@solocamo3654]

SOTR with the 10900k did show a substantial lead in min fps going with 8 cores, and still improved going to 10 so there are definitely games out there, especially now, that will use the extra cores.

[@artins90]

I would appreciate a follow-up to this video covering emulation performance, RPCS3 and Yuzu specifically.

Problem with these infopacked videos is the fact that i get more questions to ask from them. My 5600X and 6750XT is looking a bit slow on my ultra-wide running games like Hogwarts and Cyberpunk in 3440x1440... so i am looking to upgrade and as i see it, my road forward is X3D and 7800XT. What i would like to see is a video showing what happens when you go X3D and switch-around on graphics. What would be my best way forward? Stay AMD or go nVidia? Too many questions :-)

[@Gofr5]

And people told me my Ryzen 5 7600 paired with my 7900XTX was a complete waste. Though I also game at 4k where CPU pretty much doesn't matter anyway so why pay more for a part that isn't doing much?

[@MCstrickG6]

Very informative, thank you. There are some particularities, but but some things will never linear.

[@dangahagan7645]

Would love to see a comparison of cache capacity vs clock speeds. Those seem to be the most important factors, but I’m curious which is more important, and to what degree.

[@SuperAaronbennett]

I have an assumption that if games can be programmed/coded to take advantage of the larger cache on CPUs, then modders should be able to create something similar. Maybe its something that AMD can put in their drivers, although unlikely as I would think this would be game specific but Nvidia has been doing that for a while via Geforce Experience so I would think its something that they could do if they have the resource capacity. Lets get some cache mods out there!!

[@robertt9342]

I always wonder if you could avoid the stuttering mentioned by Steve by isolating some extra processes to specific cores and maintain 6 for just the game you’re playing.

[@markcentral]

2:25 - Why is Steve taking credit for putting out the knowledge that cache improves performance? Admittedly I am an old person, but the performance gains were obvious even back in the 386/486 days when motherboards would offer sockets to add more cache to your system

[@jaynj908]

I agree with his findings. But games like Transport Fever where as you progress and build more assets, more cores will improve performance. I played the game on 4, 6, 8, 12, and 16 cores

[@AhriiiVT]

I'm curious to know if you locked the CPU Core clocks of the 5700G/5800X to be identical (and the same for the 5600G/X) just how much the cache itself makes a difference between those two. I mention this, as the cache clocks on Zen chips is tied to the CPU Core clocks. I.e. CPU Freq of 4GHz means the cache is also at 4GHz. Great content though!

[@kendil22]

I would have a preferred 7000 series test

[@MrDrTheJniac]

Wendell from Level1Techs thought that 3DVCache is helping overcome memory bandwidth and of latency limitations. I would be curious to see how tweaking the RAM affects the performance delta between the vanilla and X3D parts.

[@abyogairyadfaizin]

15:26 performance degredation mainly caused by limitation of bandwith storage issue. I have tried installing and updating game in background with SSD 1 and gaming with SSD 2 there is no noticeable frame drop issue so far (keep in mind I am using Core i5 12400 and 2 SATA SSD)

[@mattliston1215]

Would have been fantastic to also see the 5900x in there, with its 64mb L3 cache. Plus it is easier to keep cool with the cores spread out a bit more, especially for FCLK and RAM tuning

[@matttiaz7576]

Steve did point at the start of the video. The test was based on SINGLE CCD cpus, for that reason the high latency of dual ccd can be missreading. Ofcourse you can disable one CCD and the 5900x become a 6 core single CCD , but would be not possible to comparade the same CPU at 8 cores.

[@garryarganis5801]

it would be great if you could include one of the many RE engine games to see how they fair, and see if they get any benefits from the extra L3 cache examples, RE4R, street fighter 6, monster hunter devil may cry etc.

[@m_sedziwoj]

Great video, hope AMD and Intel will use this to make more cache for gaming CPU, because it is interesting how far is scale.

[@SamuelJakobs]

Great video! But I feel like taking clock speed into consideration would be important

[@itchytastyurr]

10600k 1mb cache per thread. 10900k 2mb pt. i got 5700g w half cache of x at 1mb pt. the 5000 series is the peak of am4 so an upgrade will only be a side-grade unless i get more cores 5900x with 2.9mb cache per thread- but a 8c 3d would give me 0ver 6mb per thread. i was thinking blender physics only used 4 threads for rigid body sims (i like to pile thousand of bricks just to knock them down!) and read that physics in general have to keep to single core calculations so not to loose track of lists of objects interacting so can not be observed in separate threads. this point might make me consider a 3d variant.

[@henryd4331]

Does cache difference matter as much or at all when gaming at 1440p?

[@csl750]

Interesting question... as the load moves more to the GPU..

[@melexxa]

Depends on the game, for ex Hogwarts Legacy 45 --> 60 FPS, the 7800X3D can even do up to 90FPS Also, turning on RT further increases the CPU bottleneck, so it's useful with that as well but depends if the GPU is even able to limit the CPU at 1440P RT. edit: should also add, that in esports games running at whatever resolution but competitive settings (all low) should be benefited the most with higher L3 cache CPUs despite of the resolution, well at least with a GPU like the 6700XT or faster.

[@fracturedlife1393]

Depends on game. ACC some CPUs run 1-2% slower on 1440p, then with x3d FPS is massively higher and 1440p starts to become GPU bound more often.

[@BlackHoleForge]

I really like this episode. Can you guys do another episode comparing l3 caches versus speed of ram?