As I wrote in my PC Performance Analysis, Avowed is one of the few games that can use more than 8 CPU threads. So, I wondered whether the game would run faster with a fully unlocked AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. And the answer is yes.
But what do I mean by saying a “fully unlocked” AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D? Since upgrading our main PC gaming system to an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, we have disabled its second CCD. That’s the CCD that does not have a 3D V-Cache. The reason I’ve disabled it is because some games can use by default the second CCD, something that will hinder performance. Plus, a lot of games could not take advantage of more than 6 CPU cores, so there was no point in running the CPU with both CCDs. Things though may soon change.
Before continuing, here are the specs of our PC gaming system.
- AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
- Gigabyte Motherboard X670E AORUS MASTER
- G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 32GB DDR5 RAM at 6000Mhz
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition
- Corsair PSU HX Series 1200W
- Windows 10 64-bit
- NVIDIA GeForce 572.16 WHQL driver
So after unlocking the second CCD, I tried running Avowed. And, to no one’s surprise, the game defaulted to the second CCD. Thankfully, though, there is a program that allows you to prioritize the CCD with the 3D V-Cache. This program is called “vcache-tray”, and I highly recommend downloading it. And yes, it works.
Here is a screenshot at 720p/Epic Settings/No RT. The first six CPU cores are those of CCD0 (that’s the CCD with the 3D V-Cache) and the six bottom CPU cores (CPU9-CPU16) are those of CCD1.
Now the good news is that in our CPU-bound scene, we saw a 15% performance increase over the 8cores/8threads configuration. That’s a pretty healthy performance boost. Compared to the 8cores/16threads config, we only see an 8-9% performance boost. Still, this is one of the rare cases in which a game runs noticeably faster on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D when using both of its CCDs. You can also see that the game used the 7950X3D at around 74% (so there is still room for improvement here).
I’ve also tried Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. And yes, this is another game that benefits from the two CCDs of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Without SMT, my minimum framerate increased from 92FPS to 115FPS (that’s a 25% performance increase). The performance difference between the 8cores/16threads and 16threads/16threads configs is around 13%. Pretty solid results in my opinion.
So there you have it. To be honest, I’m pretty impressed with the CPU scaling of Avowed. After all, this is an Unreal Engine 5 game. A lot of people have criticized this engine. But, in the right hands, UE5 can scale incredibly well.
Stay tuned for more!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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John was the 16core / 32 threads any better than the 16c/16t in these games?
Nope, there is no benefit.
Why not simply use Process lasso? Process lasso is just an amazing piece of software
I wonder how it performs on a 13600K or 14600K with 6p + 8e cores in comparison.
Well considering that X3D CPUs already beat those Intel CPUs in many if not most games, I wouldn't expect things to be much different here. Those e cores are real stinkers, in at least some cases disabling them actually increases performance because it reduces the overheating of those hot running CPUs.
Just in case you needed more proof that Avowed is worse than 20 year old games:
🤣🤣🤣
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhL1NZugsBk
It's unbelievable.
BTW are you on RPG Codex?
wth is Rpg Codex still a thing ?
Why wouldn’t it be?
may other rpg sites have closed over the years that’s why, i’m glad this one survived
Sure there is a boost but not nearly enough to justify the higher costs since in actual gameplay even at "CPU bottleneck settings" no one will be able to tell the difference much less with "normal" settings where any differences measured would be well within the margin of error.
However it is a good example of a game with really good scalable threading. If Witcher 3 Next Gen had threading like this it would blow away most games with Ray Tracing but as it is now RT is best left off
"To be honest, I’m pretty impressed with the CPU scaling of Avowed. After all, this is an Unreal Engine 5 game. A lot of people have criticized this engine. But, in the right hands, UE5 can scale incredibly well."
No reason to cry, lad. It's just a software!
Back in the day, devs had two Olivetti Lettera 31 to use, and they made awesome games with that.
Today's devs had all the best tools and they can only make poor and disgusting propaganda!
We're evolving, but backwards!
I believe AMD has said on more than one occasion that 3D V-cache on both chiplets barely help, and the cost is simply not worth the effort. They'd probably need to engineer V-cache differently in order for it to be useful for that type of configuration, and hopefully they do it for whatever comes after Zen 6.
25% more CPU utilization for barely 10% more frame rate huh? I'm not saying this isn't interesting, I've been curious if this kind of thing could be the case, but I'm not exactly blown away by how much more resources it uses for how much benefit you actually get out of it.
In any case I feel the need to point out that this article can't keep the core count of the 7950 X3D straight, oscillating between 16 or 12 total cores in different parts of the article. And if games are automatically defaulting to the second CCD without disabling it, you're doing something wrong. I know, a lot of digital ink has been spilled about all the elaborate ways people have tried to control which cores games run on, but the fact is AMD's drivers have ways of controlling this and it's worked largely flawlessly for me from the first moment I got the CPU with the caveat that you have to have balanced power mode selected, I suspect a lot of people just don't know that.
The application that this article suggested you use in order to control which CCD games run on hasn't been updated for over a year. Perhaps things were worse then, it seems like AMD has improved the drivers since these chips were first released. In any case if I read the notes about the app right it's just an override for AMDs already present solution of controlling which CCD games run on which allows you to manually specify what you can already specify using game bar. So I'm honestly not sure what the benefit of using it even is.
Well it uses it, but I'm not exactly sure about the effectively apart. It seems to use a lot more resources compared to the increase in performance it gives you. And the fact that it can't benefit from SMT suggests a limit to their optimization rather than a reason to boast about it. SMT does work, the fact that it isn't helping here is a limitation rather than a benefit.
I've got a 7950 X3D and it was plug and play. AMD's drivers took care of the CCD scheduling just like they're supposed to. I honestly don't understand why so many people are having trouble with it. As a matter of fact the tweak app that this article references appears to use the same system but presents a different way to manually override it for some reason. There is already a way to Tell it if it isn't detecting a game and putting it on the correct CCD automatically.
Yes, Intel has been bombing us with more and more cores for a while now, but they're struggling to make this vast core count into actual performance in games. As to AMD not putting the extra cache on both CCDs, has already mentioned they've stated that that doesn't translate to actual increases in performance and I think you can see a hint of why here. It's using a lot more CPU power but isn't getting a proportional benefit to frame rate except in the minimums. Now I'm not saying that's not a real benefit, but it looks to me like it's using the CPU less efficiently. I think you're seeing the effects of the inter CCD latency limiting the gains. Extra cache may not improve things given that extra latency.
All I want to know is if it will make cpu bound games on my 4090 get more fps at 3440×1440 vs my 7800x3d
those games run really fast on a $500 plus cpu…well how bout that.
this game is really well optimized considering im getting 60 fps consistently at 1080p on a gtx 1080 ti and a I5 9400f.
Where is the 16 Cores/32 Threads test???