Your comment surprises me. Although many games have made better use of all cores in recent years, if you analyze carefully you will see that most games still rely mainly on one or a few cores, and thus the maximum performance of the CPU or even the game itself (if you are CPU bound by game/engine/settings). In practice, the speed of one or two cores usually determines the speed of the CPU in the game. The other cores also do something,

In which games do you see this? And how do you view CPU usage? Do you use Task Manager and then view “Total Usage” or “Logical Processors”? Or do you use something like Afterburner?

I may be completely wrong and you know a lot more about this than I’m hinting at, but if you look at the “overutilization” I understand why you say that (and then I dare say you’re wrong). What happens then is that, since you have a lot of cores, and the majority of the cores are largely idle (because many games are in principle not well programmable for multi-threading and therefore multi-core/multi-threading due to the real-time aspect), the overall CPU usage is very low, while one or a few cores determine the actual performance because they are fully utilized and running at full speed, thus forming a bottleneck in the entire system.

Also when you look at logical processors, the fact that on most charts it looks like you still have a lot of CPU capacity left is misleading. The fact that many games rely relatively heavily on single-threaded performance due to the underlying principle (leaving aside turn-based strategy games, for example) means that in practice single-threaded performance on CPUs is still very important, and development there has unfortunately been very slow for a number of years and has been moderate (roughly between 6th and 11th gen Intel).

This picture illustrates what I mean in an extreme way:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn….3e5c197d50cc8e2e6a1bd6f98
A total usage of 10% could be considered very low. But at the exact moment the screenshot was taken (or actually right before) there is only one core that is heavily loaded and it is also loaded to the max. In other words, the single core is the bottleneck, so you could also say that the CPU was the bottleneck at that time. In the image, the 20th thread specifically and therefore the 10th core is under maximum load and therefore likely to be the bottleneck.

I still see this kind of CPU behavior in a lot of games, although nowadays threads 2-8 are much more heavily loaded, which is actually a good development. Games like Far Cry 6 (well, basically an old engine, a further development of the first Far Cry games, with Far Cry 7 starting with a different engine) and Serious Sam 4 are examples of this.

With my 5800X3D, which isn’t a last-gen CPU but is still one of the fastest specifically for gaming, I still have this issue in some games. I definitely notice the switch from the 5950X to the 5800X3D, which gave me twice the cores in games, for example in Far Cry, to achieve a solid 120 FPS. If you turn off a lot of the graphical beauty in those types of games and lower the resolution, it’s noticeable that you’re often still CPU-bound. If you’re GPU-bound, the 1% and 0.1% FPS should increase dramatically, but it doesn’t. That’s because of the CPU.

In summary
– Low CPU usage in general does not mean that the CPU (or some of its cores) cannot be a bottleneck.
– The fact that many games nowadays use more cores does not mean that you can no longer suffer from a CPU bottleneck. In those times when one core/thread is used at 100%, there is a high probability that it is CPU-bound. The GPU is probably not 100% loaded at that moment. Even if 8 other threads are loaded at 60-80% (which in my opinion is a good use of cores in the game), this is still only 80%. The core that is loaded at 100% determines the speed of the CPU: at that moment there is no more available and the rest of the logic in the game and therefore in the PC has to wait for it.

With the latter, the overview of the performance of the Task Manager (or Afterburner for that matter) is quite misleading nowadays: since the most demanding processes change cores very regularly (due to thermal and power load, which the CPU regulates itself), you don’t see the back graph showing that there is 1 (or a few) threads/cores that are loaded at 100% all the time. However, if you carefully check whether a core or thread is used at 100% at any given time, you will see it in many games, unless you are really GPU-bound. It also depends on the games you are playing, the resolution and other settings.

[Reactie gewijzigd door xtlauke op 12 juli 2024 18:14]