X3d vs extreme single core speeds?

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tangoseal

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So I haven't been keeping up with the Joneses hardware wise lately. Have a technical question and no question is stupid, even if it's dumb.

Just out, Passmark shows the Unreleased 14900kf Intel as the fastest single core cpu ever. Quite a bit faster than say, the 7900x3d.

So... what makes a bigger difference in gaming? I know single thread is, well used to be the go to meteric for performance in gaming, but what is faster for gaming? Intels fastest single threaded cpu ever ir AMDs x3d cache stacked technology?

Gpus aside were talking cpus? I'd like to know. I want to build a strictly gaming highest performing cpu possible for now but can't determine if I should get an x3d, wait on ryzen 8000, or wait on Intel 14900kf. I'm not required to buy anything but my Lenovo Legion 3070ti 6800h cpu laptop is a little underwhelming especually in ganes like Starfield. This is coming from the guy who has a 6900xt sitting in a box, gave my son my 5800x cpu, and have owned threadrippers etc.... now I just have my laptop. My humble laptop.
 
Depends on the game, but generally more cache is better at a given cpu frequency, with the same number of instructions per clock. Any time your processor has to stop execution to fetch data from higher memory, that's more cycles you have to wait before an instruction is executed.

That said, the more cycles you have per second (hz), and the more instructions you have per cycle, the less latency is incurred from cache misses. But it is never less than the time it takes for data to be requested, and to traverse the bus, so cpu frequency has a minimal effect here.

So if the game needs a lot of data in cache all the time, it will benefit greatly from a larger, faster cache, close to the cpu. If it does not, then it will benefit more from a faster CPU.
 
There is a surprisingly large number of modern games that actually benefit from the large cache, which is why average benchmarks in recent testing have the 5800x3d and 7800x3d on top "for gaming". Some scientific workloads benefit, too. But general productivity and creativity apps and a majority of games if you count older and more obscure ones like single-core speed better.

It really depends on what you need the speed for.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Do you game at a more CPU restrictive resolution vs the Video card can handle?
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Just a Odyssey g7 1440p at 240hz

But I also have my 120hz 4k 85" Samsung qn90B TV qled which is an absolutely brilliant display rivaling even top oleds.

So I can certainly do 4k
 
Really you should look up benchmarks for the games that you play. Some games benefit hugely from the 3D cache. Some less so. In the games I play, even my 5800X3D stomps on anything Intel has out right now.

Assuming that most of the games you play respond favorably to large L3 cache, then I'd say that a 7800X3D would be a safe choice. The 7800X3D has only one 8-core CCD where every core has 3D cache. The 7900X3D and 7950X3D are both dual-CCD chips where only one of the CCDs has 3D cache, and the other does not. In the case of the 7900X3D, you only have 6 cores per CCD, so only 6 cores have 3D cache. With the 7950X3D you have 8 of each. There are two problems with the dual-CCD chips. The first is that there is additional latency any time a core from one CCD has to send information to a core that happens to be on another CCD. Since those cores are on seperate CCDs, they have to communicate across the infinite fabric, which incurs a slight latency penalty (which can potentially manifest itself in-game as micro-stutter). The second issue is that you're at the mercy of the scheduler to assign programs/games to the correct cores. Ideally this would actually be a good thing, since programs/games that benefit from 3D cache can be assigned to the 3D cache CCD, while programs/games that benefit more from raw clock-speed can be assigned to the other CCD, giving you the best of both worlds. In practice, it's sort of a shit-show and harkens back to the days of being at the mercy things like SLI profiles for good performance in games. The 7800X3D with it's single CCD, keeps things simple in that respect. If you get an AM5 motherboard, you're also likely to have another couple of generations of CPUs that will eventually work in that motherboard. Intel is way more hit-or-miss when it comes to putting newer chips in older motherboards.
 
GotNoRice said:
Really you should look up benchmarks for the games that you play. Some games benefit hugely from the 3D cache. Some less so. In the games I play, even my 5800X3D stomps on anything Intel has out right now.

Assuming that most of the games you play respond favorably to large L3 cache, then I'd say that a 7800X3D would be a safe choice. The 7800X3D has only one 8-core CCD where every core has 3D cache. The 7900X3D and 7950X3D are both dual-CCD chips where only one of the CCDs has 3D cache, and the other does not. In the case of the 7900X3D, you only have 6 cores per CCD, so only 6 cores have 3D cache. With the 7950X3D you have 8 of each. There are two problems with the dual-CCD chips. The first is that there is additional latency any time a core from one CCD has to send information to a core that happens to be on another CCD. Since those cores are on seperate CCDs, they have to communicate across the infinite fabric, which incurs a slight latency penalty (which can potentially manifest itself in-game as micro-stutter). The second issue is that you're at the mercy of the scheduler to assign programs/games to the correct cores. Ideally this would actually be a good thing, since programs/games that benefit from 3D cache can be assigned to the 3D cache CCD, while programs/games that benefit more from raw clock-speed can be assigned to the other CCD, giving you the best of both worlds. In practice, it's sort of a shit-show and harkens back to the days of being at the mercy things like SLI profiles for good performance in games. The 7800X3D with it's single CCD, keeps things simple in that respect. If you get an AM5 motherboard, you're also likely to have another couple of generations of CPUs that will eventually work in that motherboard. Intel is way more hit-or-miss when it comes to putting newer chips in older motherboards.
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That was very informative.

As far as buying a cpu for the games I play now isn't the most wise. Games get boring and new ones come out so I think it more wise to buy based on who performs overall better on average don't you think?
 
I've been gaming for decades. Always had the latest and greatest seeking the highest FPS. As I look back it always came with compromises. Turn this down or that crank this up or that oh shit budrod has a golden chip what am I going to do. Still, even budrod when that latest AAA title comes out the only thing that solves it is to upgrade. I stopped the nonsense and picked my compromises before the upgrade path was selected. Nothing rocks single core better than Intel and nothing gets you more FPS than Nvidia. That said you can see my rigs in my sig well picked parts serve me well (enough) and have for 3 years and I have no plans to upgrade for at least another year. Do I get 144 FPS in all games at 1440p even with the latest titles? Dam straight I do. Do I compromise a bit? of course but like I said nothing has changed except chasing the latest and greatest parts. Oh and I guess my bank account is a little bigger than it otherwise would be. Intel and Nvidia have pissed me off nothing they have promised has panned out. remember SLI? Talk about draining the back account... Just like the promise of Ray Tracing and DX12 with 2080ti you buy the top of the line and wasted your money because it never worked and you had to.... you guessed it... turn it off (COMPROMISE) to get decent FPS. Oh the cards and games they sold selling us a worthless bill of goods. Stop chasing the beast, give it up, or next year you'll be sorry. Better yet stop feeding the marketing beast that is sucking you dry.... Rant over.
 
owcraftsman said:
I've been gaming for decades. Always had the latest and greatest seeking the highest FPS. As I look back it always came with compromises. Turn this down or that crank this up or that oh shit budrod has a golden chip what am I going to do. Still, even budrod when that latest AAA title comes out the only thing that solves it is to upgrade. I stopped the nonsense and picked my compromises before the upgrade path was selected. Nothing rocks single core better than Intel and nothing gets you more FPS than Nvidia. That said you can see my rigs in my sig well picked parts serve me well (enough) and have for 3 years and I have no plans to upgrade for at least another year. Do I get 144 FPS in all games at 1440p even with the latest titles? Dam straight I do. Do I compromise a bit? of course but like I said nothing has changed except chasing the latest and greatest parts. Oh and I guess my bank account is a little bigger than it otherwise would be. Intel and Nvidia have pissed me off nothing they have promised has panned out. remember SLI? Talk about draining the back account... Just like the promise of Ray Tracing and DX12 with 2080ti you buy the top of the line and wasted your money because it never worked and you had to.... you guesses it... turn it off (COMPROMISE) to get decent FPS. Oh the cards and games they sold selling us a worthless bill of goods. Stop chasing the beast, give it up, or next year you'll be sorry. Better yet stop feeding the marketing beast that is sucking you dry.... Rant over.
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I used to run Quad Crossfire back in the day and I ran SLI 2080ti etc... been doing it for years all water cooled. I just am not in the loop this generation due to buying a house, selling my old house, establishing my land, etc... just havent had time like I did before but things are normalizing and wanted to look into good hardware again.
 
owcraftsman said:
Nothing rocks single core better than Intel
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You really can't make those kinds of generalizations anymore. It's more difficult than ever at this point to simply crown one CPU as "better". The simple fact of the matter is that some games really love the extra 3D cache and benefit hugely from it. Some games don't. However, there is a noticeable pattern where the majority of the games that have been notoriously poorly multi-threaded are also the ones that seem to benefit the most from 3D cache (Most MMOs, MS Flight Simulator, and others), so you could make the argument that AMD has the edge for single-threaded performance at the moment. But it really varies by game.

tangoseal said:
As far as buying a cpu for the games I play now isn't the most wise. Games get boring and new ones come out so I think it more wise to buy based on who performs overall better on average don't you think?
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I guess it depends on how often you upgrade and how long you play each game. Keeping in mind that with the AM5 platform, if the winds change direction in the next 3-4 years you can simply sell your existing CPU and buy a new CPU to stick in your existing motherboard. Averages are also based on existing games, many of which are quite old. It's not a window into the future. Might as well get a CPU that works great for you right now. While not all games benefit hugely from 3D cache, more games benefit from it compared to those that don't, and I don't see that changing in the future.

Also, I mentioned the potential issues with the Dual-CCD AMD chips and being at the mercy of the scheduler. With an Intel chip, it's a similar situation if not worse. With their existing designs, they can't put enough regular CPU cores (P Cores) on each chip to compete with the high-end AMD chips without exceeding practical levels of power-consumption and heat-output, so they added a bunch of smaller, slower "E Cores" to their top-end CPUs. For example, the 14900k will have 8 P-cores and 16 E-Cores! This allows intel to advertise it as a "24 core CPU" but in reality the number of cores that are actually useful for gaming is 8, no more than a 7800X3D. The LAST thing you want is for your game to end up on a slow E-Core. They are really only useful in highly multi-threaded scenarios such as productivity applications and benchmarks. So again, you are at the mercy of the scheduler. You do have the option to simply disable the E-Cores, but that seems like a terrible compromise to have to make to compensate for a bad design IMO.
 
tangoseal said:
As far as buying a cpu for the games I play now isn't the most wise. Games get boring and new ones come out so I think it more wise to buy based on who performs overall better on average don't you think?
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If we look at AMD's first try at V-Cache CPUs on Zen 3: Overall, they tend to just about match the non-vcache Zen 4 chips, in gaming (for the games which respond decently to the cache, which is many). So, its reasonable to think that the vcache Zen 4 chips, will more/less match the standard Zen 5 CPUs, in gaming. Although, Zen 5 is supposed to be a bigger performance jump, than Zen 4 was from 3. So it may not exactly work out that way.
 
Hardware unboxed just released a video comparing the 14900ks vs the 7800x3d in games. All the reviews, not just theirs, *IF* we're talking about gaming, if we want to be really conservative they trade blows. However the 7800x3d does it at half the cost, and half the power consumption. I'm not saying that's the be all and end all, but it's a significant thing to think about.
 
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The beauty of the 7800x3D is its cheap (in comparison to alternatives), zero complications with dual CCD's to think about (even if they are avoidable), stupid easy to cool, unbelievably low powered and last but not least.... "as near as makes no difference" as fast as you're going to get for gaming. Period. If a 14900ks is slightly faster at one particular title... who really cares, your experience is unchanged and you spent less on the chip and cooling.

If you really just want to play games, its kind of a no brainer.
 
criccio said:
The beauty of the 7800x3D is its cheap (in comparison to alternatives), zero complications with dual CCD's to think about (even if they are avoidable), stupid easy to cool, unbelievably low powered and last but not least.... "as near as makes no difference" as fast as you're going to get for gaming. Period. If a 14900ks is slightly faster at one particular title... who really cares, your experience is unchanged and you spent less on the chip and cooling.

If you really just want to play games, its kind of a no brainer.
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Yep, that's why I chose it. These days my rig is 95% games, occationally I'll virtualize something to play with. But that's it.
 
OFaceSIG said:
Hardware unboxed just released a video comparing the 14900ks vs the 7800x3d in games. All the reviews, not just theirs, *IF* we're talking about gaming, if we want to be really conservative they trade blows. However the 7800x3d does it at half the cost, and half the power consumption. I'm not saying that's the be all and end all, but it's a significant thing to think about.
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As I mentioned earlier in this old thread, the performance boost from the extra cache is a lot more difficult to judge broadly compared to traditional CPU performance criteria. While all games will benefit from the extra cache to some extent, that benefit could be 5% or 75% depending on the game. I agree that the 7800X3D is the best all-around gaming CPU right now for many different reasons, but if you spend most of your time mainly just playing one or two games, then it probably makes sense to focus on the performance in those games. In a game like CS:GO, a 7800X would beat a 7800X3D in most cases, and a 14900KS probably would also. That's because the game heavily favors clockspeed and sees only minimal benefits from cache. On the other end of the spectrum, games like World of Warcraft love the extra cache so much that even an older 5800X3D would still destroy a 14900KS.
 
Can somebody help me find the article I saw? It was about how when games get too big for the cache performance tanks? I can’t remember, maybe one of you do. It’s been bugging me.
 
Randall Stephens said:
Can somebody help me find the article I saw? It was about how when games get too big for the cache performance tanks? I can’t remember, maybe one of you do. It’s been bugging me.
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I mean, any recent game (last 10 years) won't be able to keep the whole game in cache. If the whole thing fits in it will really fly, but that'll only happen in old games that already are pulling hundreds of fps.
 
bobzdar said:
I mean, any recent game (last 10 years) won't be able to keep the whole game in cache. If the whole thing fits in it will really fly, but that'll only happen in old games that already are pulling hundreds of fps.
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I’m with you. What I remember it was about how longer benchmarking sessions saw decreased performance over uptime.
 
GotNoRice said:
As I mentioned earlier in this old thread, the performance boost from the extra cache is a lot more difficult to judge broadly compared to traditional CPU performance criteria. While all games will benefit from the extra cache to some extent, that benefit could be 5% or 75% depending on the game. I agree that the 7800X3D is the best all-around gaming CPU right now for many different reasons, but if you spend most of your time mainly just playing one or two games, then it probably makes sense to focus on the performance in those games. In a game like CS:GO, a 7800X would beat a 7800X3D in most cases, and a 14900KS probably would also. That's because the game heavily favors clockspeed and sees only minimal benefits from cache. On the other end of the spectrum, games like World of Warcraft love the extra cache so much that even an older 5800X3D would still destroy a 14900KS.
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One of the largest CSGO tournaments in the world just stated they are going exclusively 7800x3D for the next tournament. ;)
 
OFaceSIG said:
One of the largest CSGO tournaments in the world just stated they are going exclusively 7800x3D for the next tournament. ;)
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So what's your point exactly?

In no way was I actually recommending either of the CPUs that I said were faster in CS:GO. I was simply pointing out that there are some games that prefer clockspeed over cache, and gave an example.

Looking at the benchmarks, you can see that what I said is true. The 14900K is faster than the 7800X3D in CS:GO, and so is the 7950X3D, with even the 7600X delivering more FPS in some cases:
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-intel-core-i9-14900k-core-i5-14600k-review?page=3

I'd personally recommend the 7800X3D either way (just like I said before), but if someone only plays a select few games that just happen to be faster on those other CPUs, that may be something that they would want to contemplate.

I'll also say that I did a bit of a double-take reading your post. Do CS:GO tournaments really dictate the hardware that players use? To me, that would be like a Golf tournament dictating what clubs a player could use. Kind of disturbing IMO.
 
GotNoRice said:
So what's your point exactly?

In no way was I actually recommending either of the CPUs that I said were faster in CS:GO. I was simply pointing out that there are some games that prefer clockspeed over cache, and gave an example.

Looking at the benchmarks, you can see that what I said is true. The 14900K is faster than the 7800X3D in CS:GO, and so is the 7950X3D, with even the 7600X delivering more FPS in some cases:
https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2023-intel-core-i9-14900k-core-i5-14600k-review?page=3

I'd personally recommend the 7800X3D either way (just like I said before), but if someone only plays a select few games that just happen to be faster on those other CPUs, that may be something that they would want to contemplate.

I'll also say that I did a bit of a double-take reading your post. Do CS:GO tournaments really dictate the hardware that players use? To me, that would be like a Golf tournament dictating what clubs a player could use. Kind of disturbing IMO.
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Having a different golf club doesn't improve your performance, necessarily, but having faster computer hardware definitely does (even if you still are a shitty player in the end). The idea is to not give people with more money a distinct advantage in a tournament setting, where individual skill is the focus. It also helps prevent cheating if the host is providing a standard set of hardware, although i don't know if that's what happens in practice.

Choosing the correct set of clubs for a particular course is also somewhat a skill, and what works for one person might be terrible for another. Otoh, it's pretty easy to find computer hardware that consistently performs better for CS:GO, regardless of the user (although certain hardware, like kb/mouse or monitor, might be better for some than others).
 
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Nobu said:
Having a different golf club doesn't improve your performance, necessarily, but having faster computer hardware definitely does (even if you still are a shitty player in the end). The idea is to not give people with more money a distinct advantage in a tournament setting, where individual skill is the focus. It also helps prevent cheating if the host is providing a standard set of hardware, although i don't know if that's what happens in practice.
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I guess I see the NASCAR-style logic, but as someone who actually helped run Counter-Strike tournaments back in the LANParty days, it still makes me sad, as your computer was always part of the equation, and that was never considered to be a bad thing. Anyone who can't afford a good computer should probably just choose a different hobby IMO.
 
GotNoRice said:
I guess I see the NASCAR-style logic, but as someone who actually helped run Counter-Strike tournaments back in the LANParty days, it still makes me sad, as your computer was always part of the equation, and that was never considered to be a bad thing. Anyone who can't afford a good computer should probably just choose a different hobby IMO.
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fwiw, professional golf tournements often specify what balls may be used, because certain balls perform much better than others under the same conditions. The analogy here fits better, imo. Edit: well, I guess they don't provide the balls, but they're pretty strict about how they must be constructed, and provide a list of balls that are approved.
 
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I dont know but I bought the 7800x3d and its extremely fast in games and that is all that I care about. I enjoy the chip now. I can tell the difference between the one I have and my sons 5800x.
 
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