Users of AMD’s most powerful processor, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D, have found that half the cores go to snuff when running certain games, making them perform like a Ryzen 7 7800X3D today in those cases. Taking into account that the price of one model almost doubles that of another, this is making some users nervous, however, it is not bad news and we are going to explain the reason.
To this day, no computer game asks for more than 8 cores. So using a 16-core chip is theoretically overkill today, since half of the threads aren’t going to be used today period. However, the one who chooses this is not the game itself, but the operating system that the processes always distribute today with the tendency to search for available resources. In general, this causes applications, of whatever type they are, to use the cores inefficiently, since they do not get all the performance out of each one of them. HP Well, AMD has taken the bull by the horns and with the latest driver for its processors has made a decision that is less controversial
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 in it you can see several anomalies that have powerfully caught our attention. We have to start from the fact that although 32 CPUs are listed, in reality there are not 32 cores, but the execution threads, since there are really 16 cores with a multithreaded SMT x 2 for each of them.
What is striking is that the threads corresponding to the second CCD, which integrates the cores from ninth to 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 processor resources. The usual thing is that if one of the resources is saturated, it is to free it partially or totally from a load, making others do that work as much as possible.
Although it is not the only thing, we have the other point in the clock speed of the first to the eighth core, they are in Boost speed at all times, while half of the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is on vacation in this case. What’s more, at 3.6 GHz it’s below 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 are going to perform better than the second half when it comes to running the games. Well, all this has an explanation and that is that AMD has just released a new driver that affects the management of Windows processes that causes the second block of chips to be completely disabled.
To do this they use a function that all modern processors have called Core Parking, it is a feature that allows deactivating processor cores that are in disuse. The objective? 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 executed, they have enough workload to activate the Boost speed.
For us, the Ryzen 9 with V-Cache are not for the average user who simply plays quietly from home, but for users who, for example, intend to stream on Twitch or YouTube, where more cores do They are going to be used, either to encode video if we don’t have a good capture device or to run applications like Discord or OBS. Otherwise, the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is well above what 99% of users require. Not surprisingly, it is a top-of-the-range chip that costs a whole salary.
