AMD is smoother, and other debunkings of r/amd zingers

Not really, if you play a modern game and aim for anything near 90%+ gpu utilization, even nvenc is not good enough and causes frame losses in obs. At that point you’d be much better off with a cpu that has a high core/thread count which is why I specifically mentioned it.
If you're trying to max performance at all angles, then yes as I mentioned, you should probably look at benchmarks specific to your use case and be prepared to spend more.
 
Im not watching the video. I love how Gamers Nexus gives an opinion and therefore it is law.
They present their facts.
I find it funny that AMD is not smoother. How do you even define that operationally?
That is quite literally explained in the video. You could even say that explaining that definition, something not new to anyone following game performance in the last decade, was the point of the video.
 
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1.) Why would you reinstall quite often? What do you consider often? This behavior also doesn't make much sense. If you reinstall quite often, then why not when changing motherboards? Changing motherboards, chipsets, etc. usually makes an OS reinstall a pretty good idea. It's not 100% necessary, but you can avoid potential problems by doing so.
2.) Well, placebo effects are not necessarily confined to a single person. Two people with a financial investment in their new hardware doing something similar, with likely yield the same results. By replacing the boards and CPU's, you won't have these two configurations side by side either. That said, I didn't write off your experiences. I'm not doubting the new system configuration is faster than the old one. I'm simply stating that there are mitigating reasons behind what you are feeling that explain it without saying some bullshit like "Ryzen is smoother." All things being equal, it simply isn't. That's what you aren't getting. Things are not equal in your example. You are comparing a 8c/16t CPU with a very different platform to a 16c/32t CPU on a newer and yet very different platform. It isn't that simple. Is that simple enough to understand?
3.) When we are talking about new hardware vs. old, the newer hardware will usually provide a better experience. That's kind of how things work. What I said about fair comparisons is difficult to do as most people don't necessarily do things to create the most accurate comparisons between the two platforms. You replaced your old CPU with a newer, faster one, but that by itself does not prove AMD's Ryzen is smoother than Intel's offerings.

As for having higher ground to stand on, I believe I do. I've had the 9900K, 3900X, 3950X, 10900K, and 10980XE running in the same room next to each other with most of those at the same time. I've run these chips on multiple motherboards across a wide variety of tests. I continue to do reviews even though HardOCP is no longer around and I've had this hardware in hand, side by side. I have multiple copies of the same drives and other hardware. It makes making such a comparison easier. In the example I gave between the 3900X and the 9900K, I wasn't even looking for such a difference when I found one. When comparing the Core i9-10980XE to the Ryzen 9 3950X, I couldn't tell any difference at all. That Intel Core i9-10980XE is closer to a Ryzen 3950X than your 7800X or 7820X is. It has more L3 cache and is closer on core counts.

In addition to being on the test bench for reviews, I've had people over at my house to play games on the test bench machines. They can't seem to tell the difference between a 3900X and a 9900K. So yes, I do believe I have enough information to say that Ryzen 3000 series CPU's are not smoother than Intel's Core i9 9900K, 10980XE or 10900K.
I stated that I DID fresh install and my friend did not. I also stated that your argument would be exactly what it is and then you go on to say that your anecdotal comparisons are more valid than mine and everyone elses so what am I missing?
 
Part of the problem is that benchmarking sites (every last one of them, including this one when it did reviews) do not measure spool-up delay or single-task transactional latency. Responsiveness often is perceived as "smoothness" but virtually all benchmarks focus on assessing sustained throughput of one thing or another. Furthermore, and not to trivialize it too much, but sustained throughput benchmarks are incredibly simple to run - a child could do it. Task and transaction timing analysis requires much more sophisticated tools and expertise, particularly on modern systems, that I believe is well outside the expertise of most tech site reviewers and youtubers who would not know what to do with an on-chip debugger or HW/SW profiling toolchain if it landed on their lap.

So, they tend not to capture or measure how quickly a processor spools up from an energy saving state, nor how quickly a chipset begins to service a NVMe I/O call, nor how efficiently an OS executes process instantiation on one hardware architecture versus another. And they certainly won't describe how efficiently an interrupt-based architecture is actually working on the Intel box vs. the AMD box. They don't need to because the true definition of "smoothness" - guaranteed timing - is actually not a requirement of PC, IT/server or gaming hardware at all. Be it Windows, Linux or BSD, none provide that utterly predictable timing stability that a RTOS does. Naturally, none of the applications running atop are measured on the basis of this predictability, and the benchmarking and measurement tools for the most part lack the necessary robustness as well.

I'd love to see a site tackle this topic more thoroughly if it's even possible with x86 hardware and operating systems. Until then I suppose we'll just have to live with people arguing about whose "experience" is bigger and more awesome.
 
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It also depends on what kind of workloads and background workloads you are running.
People that are going to have a lot of background workloads (like me) are going to want something like Ryzen where you can get more cores for cheaper.
In my case, Ryzen is "smoother" in that it is able to better run the services/applications I have without bogging down as much and using less power than an similarly priced Intel system.
Oh and also I have a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD...
For a dedicated gaming system, Intel would probably be a better choice, but I never "only play games" on a PC.
Consoles are dedicated gaming devices and funnily enough use AMD CPUs.
PCs are my "Do everything" device or "get work done" device and play games after lol
 
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I stated that I DID fresh install and my friend did not. I also stated that your argument would be exactly what it is and then you go on to say that your anecdotal comparisons are more valid than mine and everyone elses so what am I missing?

Apparently, reading comprehension isn't your strong suit today. What I said was, I didn't doubt your experiences. Let me say that one more time: I didn't doubt your experience and your conclusion that the 3950X is faster than the 7820X it replaced. Are we clear on that? Let's hope so. Now, what I also said was that it isn't because a Ryzen 3000 series CPU is faster than an equivalent Intel CPU. You were not replacing an equivalent CPU. Are we clear on that?

Your anecdote about Ryzen being smoother than Intel is something I refute for reasons I've already given. That does not mean that I don't believe your experience with a Ryzen 3950X system was better than the outgoing Intel CPU. What you've said doesn't prove this is the case and I told you why it doesn't. For one thing, you are comparison CPU's with very disparate core and thread counts. As for my experiences, I've had more examples of this hardware on the test bench next to one another. I've been benchmarking them, reviewing them and so on. I think I'm in a better position to answer this question based on the fact that I've had equivalent hardware on both sides. And a lot of it. I've been comparing these CPU's before the Ryzen 3000 was commercially available. Same with the 10900K, 10980XE, and so on. I have a lot of experience on the matter.

Again, I don't think you are wrong for saying your 3950X was an upgrade from your previous CPU. I'm saying its simply because we are talking about disparate CPU's. Try that with CPU's with closer core counts like the 10980XE and you'd be much less likely to notice a difference between them outside of applications that favor one or the other for architectural reasons. I've had 3700X's next to 9900K's and 3900X's next to 10900K's and so on. I've also tested the 3950X and the 10980XE. Your experience, while perfectly valid was not based on two identical systems doing the same things next to each other. That's what you are missing.
 
Apparently, reading comprehension isn't your strong suit today. What I said was, I didn't doubt your experiences. Let me say that one more time: I didn't doubt your experience and your conclusion that the 3950X is faster than the 7820X it replaced. Are we clear on that? Let's hope so. Now, what I also said was that it isn't because a Ryzen 3000 series CPU is faster than an equivalent Intel CPU. You were not replacing an equivalent CPU. Are we clear on that?

Your anecdote about Ryzen being smoother than Intel is something I refute for reasons I've already given. That does not mean that I don't believe your experience with a Ryzen 3950X system was better than the outgoing Intel CPU. What you've said doesn't prove this is the case and I told you why it doesn't. For one thing, you are comparison CPU's with very disparate core and thread counts. As for my experiences, I've had more examples of this hardware on the test bench next to one another. I've been benchmarking them, reviewing them and so on. I think I'm in a better position to answer this question based on the fact that I've had equivalent hardware on both sides. And a lot of it. I've been comparing these CPU's before the Ryzen 3000 was commercially available. Same with the 10900K, 10980XE, and so on. I have a lot of experience on the matter.

Again, I don't think you are wrong for saying your 3950X was an upgrade from your previous CPU. I'm saying its simply because we are talking about disparate CPU's. Try that with CPU's with closer core counts like the 10980XE and you'd be much less likely to notice a difference between them outside of applications that favor one or the other for architectural reasons. I've had 3700X's next to 9900K's and 3900X's next to 10900K's and so on. I've also tested the 3950X and the 10980XE. Your experience, while perfectly valid was not based on two identical systems doing the same things next to each other. That's what you are missing.

What counts as "Equivalent Hardware"? Equivalent Price? Equivalent performance? Equivalent core/thread count?
 
Part of the problem is that benchmarking sites (every last one of them, including this one when it did reviews) do not measure spool-up delay or single-task transactional latency. Responsiveness often is perceived as "smoothness" but virtually all benchmarks focus on assessing sustained throughput of one thing or another. Furthermore, and not to trivialize it too much, but sustained throughput benchmarks are incredibly simple to run - a child could do it. Task and transaction timing analysis requires much more sophisticated tools and expertise, particularly on modern systems, that I believe is well outside the expertise of most tech site reviewers and youtubers who would not know what to do with an on-chip debugger or HW/SW profiling toolchain if it landed on their lap.

So, they tend not to capture or measure how quickly a processor spools up from an energy saving state, nor how quickly a chipset begins to service a NVMe I/O call, nor how efficiently an OS executes process instantiation on one hardware architecture versus another. And they certainly won't describe how efficiently an interrupt-based architecture is actually working on the Intel box vs. the AMD box. They don't need to because the true definition of "smoothness" - guaranteed timing - is actually not a requirement of PC, IT/server or gaming hardware at all. Be it Windows, Linux or BSD, none provide that utterly predictable timing stability that a RTOS does. Naturally, none of the applications running atop are measured on the basis of this predictability, and the benchmarking and measurement tools for the most part lack the necessary robustness as well.

I'd love to see a site tackle this topic more thoroughly if it's even possible with x86 hardware and operating systems.

You are correct. The problem is, I don't know how I would be able to measure those. Again, I perceive a slight difference between them in some cases, but it's hard to quantify. I don't know any way to do effectively. Also, I believe the difference is so small as to be virtually irrelevant. Even if its something I spot on the desktop opening folders, or a browser, I do not notice this in actual applications or games.
 
You are correct. The problem is, I don't know how I would be able to measure those. Again, I perceive a slight difference between them in some cases, but it's hard to quantify. I don't know any way to do effectively. Also, I believe the difference is so small as to be virtually irrelevant. Even if its something I spot on the desktop opening folders, or a browser, I do not notice this in actual applications or games.

I'm not sure either.

Some operating systems (Solaris comes to mind) included sufficient instrumentation to perhaps measure responsiveness, but I do not know if say Windows or Linux are up to that task. Another option would be benchmarks that test primitives e.g. think of the old Ziff Davis PC Bench / WinBench benchmarks. Those were designed to measure responsiveness at a time when it mattered a great deal. I wonder if a modern day equivalent could be designed. I do concur that this topic is for the most part a lot less relevant these days, and probably more directly influenced by enabling/disabling UI flourishes, and using high refresh rate displays, than it is by HW platform or choice of CPU.
 
What counts as "Equivalent Hardware"? Equivalent Price? Equivalent performance? Equivalent core/thread count?

Well, in the 9900K vs. 3900X example, the two systems had virtually identical video cards, the same RAM settings, identical drive configurations, network connections, and so on. They were almost as identical as possible. Of course, the 9900K vs. the 3900X is an argument of equivalent costs at the time the 3900X was released. I've also tested the 9900K against the 3700X, which would be more functionally equivalent in terms of core and thread count. Comparing a 3950X vs. a 10980XE isn't really all that equivalent, but they are closer than you'd imagine.

Again, regarding what I was responding to, he was talking about a 3950X being faster than a 7820X in Windows. He didn't quantify that by a whole lot, but at face value this seems like a correct statement. These are not equivalent CPU's when it comes to core and thread count. But he seems to be using such a comparison to reach the conclusion that AMD's Ryzen 3000 series is "smoother" than Intel's offerings. It's a bad comparison given how disparate they are. AMD's X570 platform is also quite a lot newer than Intel's X299. The SSD he mentioned goes straight to the CPU via the CPU's PCIe x4 lanes which are dedicated to storage. The Intel setup goes through a DMI link via the PCH. There are a lot of differences here. Any or all of them could be responsible for what he experienced.

Again, he's not wrong that the 3950X was an upgrade. However, a conclusion that AMD Ryzen is smoother than Intel's Core ix series, isn't supported by that experience. It's also not supported by actual data, in which Intel CPU's usually beat out their AMD counterparts when it comes to gaming.
 
I'm not sure either.

Some operating systems (Solaris comes to mind) included sufficient instrumentation to perhaps measure responsiveness, but I do not know if say Windows or Linux are up to that task. Another option would be benchmarks that test primitives e.g. think of the old Ziff Davis PC Bench / WinBench benchmarks. Those were designed to measure responsiveness at a time when it mattered a great deal. I wonder if a modern day equivalent could be designed. I do concur that this topic is for the most part a lot less relevant these days, and probably more directly influenced by enabling/disabling UI flourishes, and using high refresh rate displays, than it is by HW platform or choice of CPU.

There are actually some tools in the Sandra suite that do some of those things. I don't know how good they are though.
 
You can attack me if you want, Dan, but you keep making my point for me only to then call it irrelevant. If you think the 3950x stock and 7820x @ 5ghz are not equivalent in Windows then why is that outside of the retail perspective? What processes is Windows taking advantage of with the extra cores/threads that makes this happen when the baseline is 8 cores/16 threads at a faster speed?
 
Well, in the 9900K vs. 3900X example, the two systems had virtually identical video cards, the same RAM settings, identical drive configurations, network connections, and so on. They were almost as identical as possible. Of course, the 9900K vs. the 3900X is an argument of equivalent costs at the time the 3900X was released. I've also tested the 9900K against the 3700X, which would be more functionally equivalent in terms of core and thread count. Comparing a 3950X vs. a 10980XE isn't really all that equivalent, but they are closer than you'd imagine.

Again, regarding what I was responding to, he was talking about a 3950X being faster than a 7820X in Windows. He didn't quantify that by a whole lot, but at face value this seems like a correct statement. These are not equivalent CPU's when it comes to core and thread count. But he seems to be using such a comparison to reach the conclusion that AMD's Ryzen 3000 series is "smoother" than Intel's offerings. It's a bad comparison given how disparate they are. AMD's X570 platform is also quite a lot newer than Intel's X299. The SSD he mentioned goes straight to the CPU via the CPU's PCIe x4 lanes which are dedicated to storage. The Intel setup goes through a DMI link via the PCH. There are a lot of differences here. Any or all of them could be responsible for what he experienced.

Again, he's not wrong that the 3950X was an upgrade. However, a conclusion that AMD Ryzen is smoother than Intel's Core ix series, isn't supported by that experience. It's also not supported by actual data, in which Intel CPU's usually beat out their AMD counterparts when it comes to gaming.
It was kind of a loaded question but, the "correct" answer depends on the user and which "Metric" is most important, which usually is price. Its one reason why the 3950x makes most if not all of Intel's HEDT irrelevant.
 
If you're trying to max performance at all angles, then yes as I mentioned, you should probably look at benchmarks specific to your use case and be prepared to spend more.

It’s not about maxing out performance but getting the best performance for your money. In this case, a 10600k wouldn’t perform as well as a 3700xt in a real world use of modern video game + obs on the same system. Very few people bother building dedicated streaming PCs so that’s why GNs test is pretty useless IMO because he purposely left out real world usage and called it a “can of worms” which is a cop out.
 
Would someone be willing to summarize GN's approach & conclusions in a few bullets? I think he has some insightful content, sometimes, but I can't take more of his 30 minute repetitive monologues to get to the punchline. I'm playing Death Stranding so I don't need more of that in my life right now :(
 
It’s not about maxing out performance but getting the best performance for your money. In this case, a 10600k wouldn’t perform as well as a 3700xt in a real world use of modern video game + obs on the same system. Very few people bother building dedicated streaming PCs so that’s why GNs test is pretty useless IMO because he purposely left out real world usage and called it a “can of worms” which is a cop out.
Again, if you're going to be doing streaming, take that into account. That's not what GN was after here. There's a whole lot more to that than just adding cores to a CPU.
 
There are actually some tools in the Sandra suite that do some of those things. I don't know how good they are though.

I'm wondering if people had a significant DPC discrepancy between their previous build (likely Intel for enthusiasts) and their new build (often AMD now)

That would be something you could measure, but wouldn't not think to check or compare. It would explain a difference in perceived smoothness (DPC can interrupt USB mice, etc) and may make you incorrectly attribute the difference to the new AMD platform.
 
There is a 'media playback' test you can do that looks for interrupts that will effect your media consumption.

When I was running on my 9900k with 32gig of PC 2666 ram, on the same drive I have today (Samsung 960 evo NVME 3.0x4) it had bad problems with interrupts to media playback according to the tool enough that I could notice it sometimes.

Post upgrade.. to a 3900x with 32 gig of DDR4 3200 ram and everything else other than the motherboard being the same... That problem is gone in testing and reality. Now admittedly it's not a 12 or 8 core Intel chip but it was a pretty current one to the 3900x.

But I will agree fully that smoothness is in the eye of the beholder. And the reason it's news that the newer AMD cpu felt smoother is for so long the level of improvement from old intel to new intel was... marginal at best.

But going from older intel to newer AMD was a leap forward.

Something that consumers simply put were not expecting based on past experience.

I mean think about it... when you went from old 4 core i7 to new 4 core i7, (2600k to 9900k) your level of improvemnt was kind of... Oh that's nice... nowhere near.. OH WOW like going from 9900k to 3900k... at least to me.
 
You can attack me if you want, Dan, but you keep making my point for me only to then call it irrelevant. If you think the 3950x stock and 7820x @ 5ghz are not equivalent in Windows then why is that outside of the retail perspective? What processes is Windows taking advantage of with the extra cores/threads that makes this happen when the baseline is 8 cores/16 threads at a faster speed?

I'm not attacking you. I'm not making your point for you either. I've acknowledged that your experience is certainly valid. However, I disagree with the conclusion you've drawn from that experience. You've made the assertion that AMD is smoother than Intel. It's a blanket statement that you have no evidence for.
 
It was kind of a loaded question but, the "correct" answer depends on the user and which "Metric" is most important, which usually is price. Its one reason why the 3950x makes most if not all of Intel's HEDT irrelevant.

Well, yes. Price is the one that matters to most people. However, it's not the only metric. I've reviewed most of the Ryzen 3000 series. I also reviewed the Core i9-10980XE. Frankly, the 3950X does largely make the Intel HEDT offerings irrelevant, but the Core i9-10980XE often out performs it. Especially when overclocked. It does so enough to say it's flat out fater at that point. However, cost, power consumption, heat, the need for quad channel memory, etc. all make for a price/performance ratio that favors AMD even though the Core i9-10980XE itself is faster than the Ryzen 9 3950X. The highest end Intel chip is literally the only one that really stands a chance without massive overclocks and probably the only one that can usually best the 3950X at anything besides gaming.

It’s not about maxing out performance but getting the best performance for your money. In this case, a 10600k wouldn’t perform as well as a 3700xt in a real world use of modern video game + obs on the same system. Very few people bother building dedicated streaming PCs so that’s why GNs test is pretty useless IMO because he purposely left out real world usage and called it a “can of worms” which is a cop out.

That's not necessarily true. There are cases where people buy hardware based on its performance with little to no thought given to the price of said hardware.

I'm wondering if people had a significant DPC discrepancy between their previous build (likely Intel for enthusiasts) and their new build (often AMD now)

That would be something you could measure, but wouldn't not think to check or compare. It would explain a difference in perceived smoothness (DPC can interrupt USB mice, etc) and may make you incorrectly attribute the difference to the new AMD platform.

This is actually a fantastic point. This is something I can actually test and have. Here are some results I've seen from recent motherboards I've tested. The only problem with going down this rabbit hole is that the results vary wildly based on a given motherboard, driver revisions, firmware levels, and whether or not you've installed the motherboard vendor's software suites. One interesting thing to note is that the systems with lower DPC values were actually tested on an older build of Windows. Older driver versions, etc. That too factors in. One note on that, is that the ASUS Maximus XI APEX and MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE were the two used for my 3900X review, and the Maximus system felt faster, though the DPC latency values don't necessarily agree with that.

1597353096878.png


These are maximum values, which leads me to start thinking about looking at their average values now as I think those matter more. The average values on some of these boards are incredibly low, but they sometimes spike quite hard. The test was actually designed to simply make sure that it never broke 1000, as that's where things get bad. But you might be on to something.
 
I'm wondering if people had a significant DPC discrepancy between their previous build (likely Intel for enthusiasts) and their new build (often AMD now)

That would be something you could measure, but wouldn't not think to check or compare. It would explain a difference in perceived smoothness (DPC can interrupt USB mice, etc) and may make you incorrectly attribute the difference to the new AMD platform.

I think this is a great point and my own highly subjective experience suggest to me that DPCs in Windows and general interrupt handling is the single largest lever. I say this because were someone to ask me what is the "smoothest" system I own, hands down I would say it's my 2012 iMac or 2016 MBP, even compared to my OC TR3 3960X, despite the latter being objectively faster than both by a wide, wide margin.
 
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Wow, this spread is rather something. Yeah, I'd love to see a mean/median, or a histogram for each board.

I never thought about it before. It was a test that, even when systems would break 1000, never seemed to give me any issues. It's something people wanted to see, but as long as it didn't break that magic 1000 barrier, it was considered all good. But, it would be interesting to see if there was a correlation between DPC latency and perceived smoothness or responsiveness from one system to the next.
 
I never thought about it before. It was a test that, even when systems would break 1000, never seemed to give me any issues. It's something people wanted to see, but as long as it didn't break that magic 1000 barrier, it was considered all good. But, it would be interesting to see if there was a correlation between DPC latency and perceived smoothness or responsiveness from one system to the next.

It would be interesting to swirl the cursor around in circles while opening windowed programs, (or dragging windows around for a length of time) on both a high and low DPC system to see if there is a difference at all. I have encountered systems that tend to stutter the mouse frequently, which does not feel "smooth" to me subjectively speaking. But I have no idea if that is DPC, the USB controller/driver or a bus that the USB controller is on getting interrupted by another device.
 
Not really, if you play a modern game and aim for anything near 90%+ gpu utilization, even nvenc is not good enough and causes frame losses in obs. At that point you’d be much better off with a cpu that has a high core/thread count which is why I specifically mentioned it.
Only NVENC's max quality setting in OBS, uses GPU resources. And that setting is only available for RTX cards with the newest NVENC encoder capability. The next step down in quality on RTX cards (whihc in turn is max quality for previous cards), it is all done by the encoder chip itself.
 
Only NVENC's max quality setting in OBS, uses GPU resources. And that setting is only available for RTX cards with the newest NVENC encoder capability. The next step down in quality on RTX cards (whihc in turn is max quality for previous cards), it is all done by the encoder chip itself.

Nope, even medium quality causes losses. I stream Warzone with my 2080 ti and nvenc doesn’t cut it when gpu utilization is maxed by the game.
 
Went from a 9900K to a 3950X and desktop experience was identical. Gaming experience was no different either. RAM amounts equal and same SSD and GPU.
 
Went from a 9900K to a 3950X and desktop experience was identical. Gaming experience was no different either. RAM amounts equal and same SSD and GPU.

Huh I perceive a difference and I went from a 9900k to a 3900k. So that is interesting. Maybe I had something mis configured before.
 
Huh I perceive a difference and I went from a 9900k to a 3900k. So that is interesting. Maybe I had something mis configured before.

I just downgraded from my 3950X to a 3700X and still notice no difference at the desktop. Haven't gamed yet.

Anyway, I suspect anything 8 cores and up is smooth regardless of manufacture on the desktop. At least in my experience.
 
I have a 9900k, I previously had a 9700k, Ryzen 1700, and before that I had an i7-5775c

I was hard pressed to find significant differences in perceived latency between them, especially when side by side. I got the 5775c specifically to limit latencies. Certainly I experienced teething issues on the 1700 as I was an early adopter. I expected this, but didn't expect them to be as ... pronounced.

What I did notice was (specifically) the 9700k hiccupped in a few games (notably the Assassin's creed series), and as the 1700 which was mildly overclocked it wasn't enormously slower than the 9700k in rendering. I moved to the 9900k quickly because I didn't want to leave 30-40% performance on the table.

That said, the 9900k is definitely faster than those that came before it in the apps that mattered to me.

I did notice a significant difference in perceived latency when I enabled speedshift on the 9900k, things got smoother.
 
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It would be interesting to swirl the cursor around in circles while opening windowed programs, (or dragging windows around for a length of time) on both a high and low DPC system to see if there is a difference at all. I have encountered systems that tend to stutter the mouse frequently, which does not feel "smooth" to me subjectively speaking. But I have no idea if that is DPC, the USB controller/driver or a bus that the USB controller is on getting interrupted by another device.

It would be interesting to see. I can do some testing on this and find out if I can perceive any difference. I'm reviewing the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master right now. I've got a Core i9-10900K in that one. My main rig is a 3950X, I also have a 3900X on the test bench.

Went from a 9900K to a 3950X and desktop experience was identical. Gaming experience was no different either. RAM amounts equal and same SSD and GPU.

As I said, between the two, side by side I felt the Intel was slightly more responsive. However, If I work with a 9900K and then step away from my desk and sit down to an AMD system, I wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Having said that, I was going over my notes and the 9900K was configured the way I always had with the system's power profile set to high performance, not the Ryzen Balanced plan which is what AMD recommended in their review kit for the Ryzen 3000 series launch. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not. Again, the difference was slight. I run everything on their performance plans regardless of what AMD says now. I've never seen a difference in doing that, but it is a difference in testing.

On my personal machine, I switched out a [email protected] for a Ryzen 9 3950X. I never noticed a difference in my personal rig before and after the upgrade in Windows. I wouldn't call that super scientific though. I changed NVMe drives as well as RAM when doing the upgrade.

I just downgraded from my 3950X to a 3700X and still notice no difference at the desktop. Haven't gamed yet.

Anyway, I suspect anything 8 cores and up is smooth regardless of manufacture on the desktop. At least in my experience.

Doing general stuff in Windows, I never noticed a difference between a 3600X, 3700X, 3900X or a 3950X. It's not until you fire up applications or games that any difference can be seen. Even then, whether or not it matters in gaming comes down to the specific game, settings, etc.
 
Intel is certainly "slicker". I think we can agree to that.
 
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I did notice a significant difference in perceived latency when I enabled speedshift on the 9900k, things got smoother.
Enabled or disabled?

As I said, between the two, side by side I felt the Intel was slightly more responsive. However, If I work with a 9900K and then step away from my desk and sit down to an AMD system, I wouldn't be able to tell a difference. Having said that, I was going over my notes and the 9900K was configured the way I always had with the system's power profile set to high performance, not the Ryzen Balanced plan which is what AMD recommended in their review kit for the Ryzen 3000 series launch. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.
Could you test if different power plans make a difference? Preferably have someone else switch them randomly to do a semi-blind test.
 
Certainly slicker at giving less for more in my opinion. Main reason I ditched the x99 and 6950x was neutering the bifurcation capabilities of the chipset. Rather than attempt a bios mod I decided to purchase hardware that met my expectations.
 
The last time I had a chance to do a test of this was with an C2D [email protected] and an Athlon64 x2 [email protected]. The Intel had twice the RAM, discrete video card and a newer, faster hard drive as it was my main system. The AMD had an older, slower hard drive, half the RAM and used the integrated video on the motherboard. For whatever reason, that Athlon64 definitely felt smoother and more responsive than the C2D. It wasn't something I was looking for but I had the systems side by side and noticed the difference when going back and forth. I couldn't tell you what the difference was but it was simply there and it was the same when both were under load or idling.

If I had the room and a spare monitor I've been tempted to resurrect that A64 system since I still have bits and pieces of it laying around. The parts were purchased on a whim and I mainly used it as a testbed system but there was something about it I really liked. Giving it up to replace an older system a relative needed replaced was somewhat painful as it ran so great.
 
The last time I had a chance to do a test of this was with an C2D [email protected] and an Athlon64 x2 [email protected]. The Intel had twice the RAM, discrete video card and a newer, faster hard drive as it was my main system. The AMD had an older, slower hard drive, half the RAM and used the integrated video on the motherboard. For whatever reason, that Athlon64 definitely felt smoother and more responsive than the C2D. It wasn't something I was looking for but I had the systems side by side and noticed the difference when going back and forth. I couldn't tell you what the difference was but it was simply there and it was the same when both were under load or idling.

If I had the room and a spare monitor I've been tempted to resurrect that A64 system since I still have bits and pieces of it laying around. The parts were purchased on a whim and I mainly used it as a testbed system but there was something about it I really liked. Giving it up to replace an older system a relative needed replaced was somewhat painful as it ran so great.

One thing you have to consider is that monitor input lag and many other factors can contribute to one system feeling smoother than another.
 
It would be interesting to see. I can do some testing on this and find out if I can perceive any difference. I'm reviewing the GIGABYTE Z490 Aorus Master right now. I've got a Core i9-10900K in that one. My main rig is a 3950X, I also have a 3900X on the test bench.

I'm using a 3900x on a X470 Gaming 7 WiFi. Anand review claimed DPC of 108 for that board, but that was a previous BIOS version. So I noticed you used LatencyMon and was going to test my own and came across this:


From https://resplendence.com/

About DPCs and ISRs

The Windows thread dispatcher (also known as scheduler) which is part of the kernel executes threads based on a priority scheme. Threads with higher priority will be given a longer execution time (also known as quantum or time slice) than threads with a lower priority. However the kernel also knows other types of units of execution known as interrupt service routines (ISRs). Devices connected to the system may interrupt on a connected CPU and cause their interrupt service routines to execute. An interrupt can occur on the same processor that an audio program is running on. Any thread that was running on the processor on which an interrupt occured will be temporarily halted regardless of its priority. The interrupt service routine (ISR) is executed and may schedule a DPC (Deferred Procedure Call) to offload an amount of work. The DPC will most likely run immediately on the same processor which means the audio application will halt until both the ISR and the DPC routines have finished execution. That is because ISRs and DPCs run at elevated IRQL which means they cannot become preempted by the thread dispatcher (scheduler). Therefore to guarantee responsiveness of the system, ISR and DPC routines should execute as fast as possible. Guidelines say that they should not spend more than 100 µs of execution time however this is often not reached due to hardware factors beyond the control of the driver developer. If execution time gets too high, the audio program may be unable to deliver audio buffers to the hardware in a timely manner.

This seems to suggest a target of 100 microseconds and a possible explanation for a perception of the smoothness claims. Unless I'm not reading this correctly, more cores means less chance of a interrupt halting your current task. Does that seem plausible?
 
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