Intel still wins in gaming, though the lead is increasingly small. That being said, Ryzen 3000 series is amazing in terms of it's value and price-performance, and unless you are specifically chasing 1080p and 144hz refresh the reality is that Intel's real-world gaming advantage is increasingly questionable and growing smaller in relevance in a world where PC gaming is moving towards higher resolutions like 1440p and 4K.
Sad to see games still using extra CPU cores so poorly.
That's just not how games work.
Games require not that many threads, because ultimately you can only throw off more threads on a limited basis. The game has AI threads, rendering threads, physics threads, misc threads like audio and input, but the number of threads will always have a finite limit unlike say x264 which can be threaded almost infinitely because you just split the rendering workload evenly.
Simultaneously, games are very tightly threaded. All threads must process in coordinated fashion, and the slowest thread will hold up the entire pipeline because you can't exactly send the next frame of the scene to the GPU for rendering before the AI is done, the engine is done, the physics are done, etc. Again, unlike say x264, you are highly timing dependent on all threads finishing before you move on to the next frame in the engine.
The reason Intel continues to win now, with AMD largely caught up in IPC, is because Intel still has a better memory controller and they still benefit from their monolithic core design whereas AMD is now on their second-gen Infinity Fabric and (arguably revolutionary) chiplets design. So really, it has nothing to do with "using extra CPU cores so poorly" and everything to do with how games inherently are and also the design paradigm AMD uses vs. the design paradigm Intel uses.
That being said:
The majority of gamers still game at 1080p with settings maxed as far as possible. Intel retains a 5-10% performance advantage in these pure gaming scenarios. Now is that worth it to you?
Let me tell you my answer:
If you have already advanced to 1440p or even 4K resolution gaming like I have, then you are dramatically GPU-bound anyways and Intel's performance lead in 1080p means literally fuck-all compared to the advantage of having 12 cores instead of 8, or 8 cores instead of 6, for things like the previously mentioned x264 where more cores and more threads straight up means more rendering speed. I am seriously considering Ryzen 9 3900X because I would really love to have 12 cores instead of the 6 cores of my current 5820K. That's literally almost a linear halving of my video rendering times in x264 and that's a huge fucking deal, much bigger than the probably almost ZERO frame rate benefit to me from upgrading from a 5820K to a 3900X because I play games in 4K and am almost entirely performance bound by my 1080 Ti at that resolution.
www.dsogaming.com
