[PLUS] Two to 16 CPU cores: The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 and 12 other games

Another pound, please!

Since the summer of 2019, thanks to the AMD Ryzen 3000 processors, gamers have been able to upgrade the world of 16 cores relatively cheaply. For the sake of completeness, however, we mention that 16 cores in the high-end desktop were also possible years earlier in the form of an Intel Core i7-7960X or AMD Threadripper 2950W, albeit very expensively. Six to eight cores are generally considered a good compromise between price and performance. But how many cores do modern games like Doom Eternal, Cyberpunk 2077 or Hitman 3 really need and where is the sweet spot? We looked into this in an extensive series of tests, with a total of 14 benchmarks and eight different core configurations.

The test setup

[PLUS] Core Scaling 2022 (2)

Source: PC Games Hardware

We only use one CPU as a substructure: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X. With up to 16 cores and 32 threads (SMT), thanks to the numerous setting options in the UEFI of the test motherboard used, an Asus X570-Plus TUF Gaming, we can set and accept any other sensible number of cores and threads. We always use both Core Complex (CCX) of the CPU in order not to give the benchmarks an unfair advantage with fewer cores (only one CCX would elicit a little more performance from the processor thanks to lower latencies). The clock rates are always the same, the CPU boosts with up to 5.05 GHz. A DDR4-3200 32 GiByte dual-ranked kit is used as the main memory. An Asus TUF RX 6900 XT with the graphics driver that was current at the time of the test (Adrenaline 22.3.2) takes on the role of graphics card. Smart Access Memory (SAM) is enabled at all times. Below you will find all 14 tested games, which we tested individually for their advantages and disadvantages with different numbers of processor cores. We round off the observation with frame times that depict one of the three benchmarks that we performed for each configuration. The following applies to frame times: the lower and the quieter the graph is, the smoother the player perceives the picture – so less is more here.

PC Games Hardware Plus

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The following topics can be found in the article:

• 8 different core configurations
• 14 games: The Ascent, Doom Eternal, F1 2021, Forza Horizon 5, Halo Infinite, The Riftbreaker, Total War Troy, Anno 1800, Watch Dogs Legion, Crysis 3 Remastered, Hitman 3, Kena – Bridge of Spirits, Cyberpunk 2077, The witcher 3

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