Users of AMD’s most powerful processor, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, have found that half the cores drop when running certain games, causing them to perform like a Ryzen 7 7800X3D today in these case. Taking into account that the price of one model almost doubles that of another, this makes some users nervous, however, this is not bad news and we will explain the reason why.
To date, no video game requires more than 8 cores. So using a 16-core chip is theoretically overkill today, since half the threads won’t be used today. However, the one who chooses is not the game itself, but the operating system that processes still distribute today with the tendency to search for available resources. In general, this causes applications of any type to use cores inefficiently, because they don’t get all the performance out of each one. HP Well, AMD has taken the bull by the horns and with the latest driver for its processors has made a less controversial decision
Half of the cores of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D are not used in games
The images found below these lines correspond to The Witcher 3 running on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D and you can see several anomalies there that powerfully caught our attention. We must start from the fact that although 32 CPUs are listed, in reality there are not 32 cores, but the threads of execution, since there are in reality 16 cores with an SMT x 2 multithreaded for each of them. them.
What is striking is that the threads corresponding to the second CCD, which integrates the cores from the ninth to the sixteenth, have a workload of 0%. And although the game does not require so many processing units to work, we must not forget that behind it there is an operating system and background applications that also consume CPU resources. Most often, if one of the resources is saturated, it is to partially or totally free it from a load, by having others do this work as much as possible.
Although it’s not the only thing we have the other point in the clock speed from the first to the eighth core they are in Boost speed at all times while half of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is vacationing in this case. Also, at 3.6 GHz, it is lower than the base clock speed.
Is it AMD’s fault? Half
The Ryzen 9 7950X3D is an asymmetric chip since one CCD integrates the V-Cache and the other does not. So the first half of the cores will perform better than the second half when it comes to running games. Well, all this has an explanation and that is that AMD has just released a new driver that affects Windows process management that causes the second block of chipsets to be completely disabled.
To do this, they use a feature that all modern CPUs have called Core Parking, it’s a feature that allows CPU cores that are no longer in use to be turned off. The goal? Being able to give more power to those that are active and give them a higher clock speed, which will consume less than having a series of cores doing nothing for lack of work for them. Although the reality in this case, hello, is that what they are looking for is none other than the first CCD, where the games are running, they have enough workload to activate the Boost speed.
For us, Ryzen 9 with V-Cache is not for the average user who just plays quietly from home, but for users who, for example, intend to stream on Twitch or YouTube, where more cores are going to be used, either to encode the video if we don’t have a good capture device, or to run apps like Discord or OBS. Otherwise, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is well above what 99% of users need. Unsurprisingly, this is a high-end chip that costs quite a salary.
