Although GPUs are often the focus of gaming, processors are also considered an important upgrade. According to AMD and Intel, we all need the faster Ryzen 7 5800X3D or Core i9-12900KS to get really good gaming performance in our games.
And that is partly true. If you upgrade a CPU made five years ago to one made today, you’ll get a lot more frames.
But when you’re considering which expensive component to upgrade to your computer next, the CPU probably shouldn’t be your first choice. Despite all the rhetoric around CPUs and gaming performance, mid-range and even low-end CPUs produced in the last 5 years might perform better than you think.
My own upgrade path
Like many people. I’ve learned just how ineffective certain upgrades can be the hard way: through firsthand experience.
I’ve had my ups and downs with CPU upgrades over the years. My first computer had an AMD A8-7650K, an APU with integrated graphics. It’s not exactly a monster gaming PC, but that’s where my journey began. In an effort to achieve better frame rates, I first resorted to upgrading my GPU, as it should be. Switching to a discrete Radeon R9 380 increased gaming performance significantly, but I was still not satisfied with the results. My machine was still struggling to hit 60 fps (frames per second) in games like wizard 3, as was my goal.
I figured if a GPU upgrade couldn’t get me there, I should upgrade my CPU. I tried the Athlon 860K, which had a higher clock speed, but no luck. I then tried an Athlon 880K with an even higher clock speed, but again my frames per second didn’t improve. Satisfied with my results, I decided to wait for AMD’s first generation Ryzen chips, which were just around the corner.
As soon as the Ryzen 1000 was released I upgraded to the Ryzen 7 1700 and luckily I was finally able to hit 60fps in almost every game I played. Unfortunately, this created the wrong perception in my head about the benefits of a CPU upgrade. I may have had a similar experience, but I went into my Ryzen upgrade cycles eager to see how it would transform my PC’s gaming performance. This is bolstered by claims from AMD and reviewers that Ryzen is finally on par with Intel in gaming performance.
You can imagine my disappointment, then, when I saw an almost identical frame rate after several generations of updates. Realizing that when it comes to CPU performance, it’s a lot more complicated than I previously thought.
CPU benchmarking is tricky
Bill Roberson/Digital Trends
If you’re like me, you may have at one point believed that CPU benchmarking worked the same as GPU benchmarking. But as I found out, it wasn’t.
The greatest strength of GPUs is flexibility. If you have a GPU and you’re not getting enough frames per second, you can simply lower your graphics quality settings to get more frames. Or if you think you have more than enough frames, you can exchange them for higher quality images.
Let’s say you have two graphics cards, the AMD RX 6950 XT and the RX 6650 XT, and you want to know how they compare when paired with a high-end CPU. If you test at 1440p and max settings in a really demanding game like cyberpunk 2077, you’ll see that the 6950 XT is about 70% faster. If you lower the settings, both GPUs will get more frames, but the 6950 XT will still be 70% faster, at least in cyberpunk 2077. This is how GPU benchmarking works and it’s pretty intuitive.
CPUs simply don’t have as much headroom as GPUs.
But CPU benchmarking is much more complicated. While comparing my Ryzen 1700, 2700, and 3700X, I tried to echo the results other reviewers got, like the claim that the 3700X is about 15% faster than the 1800X. Overclocking my 1700, I basically had an 1800X to test. However, the 3700X only matched the overclocked 1700 and I was unable to replicate the advantage that the reviews showed.
I then tried removing the graphics settings to increase the fps I was getting in games, which is something I normally wouldn’t do because I was already getting the 90 fps I wanted. As soon as I did this I started noticing the 3700X pulling away from the 1700 in most games I played and was able to replicate the 15% advantage the websites were reporting. That was my mistake.
Why is this happening in CPU benchmarking? Why was the race even with some setups, but then not as close with others? Well, as it turns out, it all comes down to the differences between the CPU and GPU bottleneck.
Bottleneck identification
A bottleneck occurs when a component is so slow that other components crash, which means that for better performance you need to update the bottlenecking component or adjust the configuration to move the bottleneck to another location. As graphics settings are lowered, CPU performance limitations become more relevant until it becomes the bottleneck.
The problem is that even the best CPUs don’t have as much headroom as GPUs. Games focus on your graphics card, so settings settings can have a big impact if you’re limited by your GPU. On the other hand, only a select few settings affect your CPU, leading to a hard wall of performance that you can’t beat no matter how many settings you change. CPUs simply aren’t as flexible as GPUs when it comes to gaming performance.
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Reviews testing at multiple resolutions and with GPUs illustrate the weird nature of the CPU bottleneck quite clearly. In this comparison between the Ryzen 5 1600 and Ryzen 5 5600, Techspot tested the 6950 XT and 6600 XT models at 1080p and 1440p. At 1440p with the 6600 XT, the 1600 and 5600 are usually a real pain, but when the PC is allowed to hit higher fps thanks to downscaling and upgrading to the 6950 XT, the 5600 falls away. On average, the 5600 was only 16% faster than the 6600 XT at 1440p, but that gap widens to over 70% with the 6950 XT at 1080p. Basically, processors have inherent frame rate limits depending on the game, and the slower the processor, the lower the limit.
You might also wonder why the 5600 can be so much faster than the 1600. Both are six-core CPUs based on similar architectures and have similar clock speeds. The key difference is cache and latency. The 5600 has 32MB of L3 cache, compared to 16MB for the 1600, and the 5600 cores can communicate with each other much faster on average than the 1600 cores. While multicore GPUs are great for gaming, the CPU the ability to move small amounts of data quickly is king.
That’s why I never saw any difference between my old A8-7650K, 860K and 880K. As it turns out, they all have the exact same amount of cache and are generally pretty similar, so you could never expect better gaming performance. However, the 3700X has twice the cache of the 1700 and 2700, so why didn’t I see an increase in frame rate after upgrading to the 3700X? This was because you didn’t really need to upgrade.
How to know you need an update
Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
Aside from all that, I’m not saying you should never upgrade your CPU. Of course not. You just have to proceed with caution.
Whether you need an update or not depends mainly on the number of frames per second you want to see in a particular game. If I had a clearer idea of what I wanted to achieve, I would have avoided the mistakes I made early on in my own upgrade journey. For example, I usually play between 60 and 90 fps because I prefer to increase the graphics settings when possible. Of course, this is why I never saw a higher frame rate after upgrading to Ryzen 3700X. The Ryzen 1700 is already capable of 60 to 90 fps in most games. Before I got that 3700X, I needed to do two things.
First, you should have checked the GPU usage of the games you played the most using Task Manager or MSI Afterburner. If you’re constantly seeing around 97% GPU usage, upgrading your CPU won’t improve your fps, because obviously your GPU is stuck. The amount of GPU usage is also important. For example, if it’s around 80-90%, upgrading the CPU will increase the frames per second, but not by much. Conversely, if your GPU usage is close to 50%, you could double your frames per second by upgrading to a better CPU.
The second thing I needed to do was think about the number of frames per second I wanted to see. In reviews of the Ryzen 3000, I saw that the 3700X was much faster than the 1700 and 2700, but I didn’t realize that reviewers like to test in high frame rate scenarios to showcase the capabilities of new CPUs. . While this is interesting for enthusiasts, it can be misleading at times. If you were aiming for frames per second closer to 200 fps, the 3700X would be a marked improvement. If you’re aiming for really high frames per second and notice your GPU usage is low, that’s a sure sign that an upgrade is a good idea.
There’s a caveat to all this: some games just don’t benefit from better hardware. My GPU usage was low when I tried to play the game All Out War: Attila on my Ryzen 1700, so I should have seen a big boost on the 3700X, and yet I didn’t. This is something that can happen with certain games, especially older ones, that are poorly optimized or have bugs that reduce performance. Before upgrading, do some research on your games and make sure people aren’t complaining that they crash on high-end hardware.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn