Gadgetory

well after reading the title of this video you probably thought yourself there goes Greg jumping off the deep end there's absolutely no chance we'll ever recover from his illness of testing pointless things and yes the 18 core 79-80 XE from Intel is rather pointless for gaming and content creation alike and I've proved that in the past you can check out this video right here for more details but I also want to stress that there is relevance behind the test I'm going to show you in this video because I want to see where the fall-off point is right when does having the X number of CPU cores stop mattering for gaming in particular and I don't have the most intensive CPU games to throw in this video I use GTA 5 and I use universe and box to bt5 is a good leverage of both the GPU and CPU horsepower I say that a lot and universe and box 2 is just a cpu killer point blank so again the point of the video we're gonna analyze CPU core scaling across titles we're gonna see when games stop caring about how many cores you have in your system and we'll also throw in a streaming option so if you want to stream via OBS which is I would say pretty common then we're gonna have that running in the background I just stream to a youtube server but it's not actually going live that's why nothing showed up live on YouTube but the streaming the encoding is all happening there in the background and you'll see that set of benchmarks subsequently so let's start first with GTA 5 again a balanced game it's actually a pretty clean port much better than GTA 4 was I think they had to make up for that loss there and this one was to be expected by the way if you want to mimic these tests with your own setup you can hop into your system bios if it's relatively modern don't say something like number of cores active there usually a button you had a change from automatic to manual when you do that you'll be able to turn off individual course course me having 18 here took a while to disable 16 of them we had to start at 2 and I doubled it to 4 and then I activated 6 and then 8 and so on all the way up to 18 you're probably wondering why I only bench 2 games in this video it's because it took so long to run all of these benchmarks it was literally nine benchmarks per title and then I had to multiply each of those diamonds too because I was also streaming in half of those so you have 9 benchmarks from each game without streaming and the 9 with streaming of the total of what 36 benchmarks so yeah I was up all night and as for GTA 5 in 1080p with very high settings no anti-aliasing no advanced graphics so as to not offset the leverage to the graphics card at 2 cores we saw an average of 96% CPU utilization I also saw one core consistently peaking at 100% utilization and that's to be expected right I mean look at all four of these threads here with multi-threading or in this case hyper threading enabled all of them were pretty much maxed out across the board that again declined to 81% when we activated four cores which is essentially you know an older era i7 processor right 4 cores and 8 threads and then up to 6 cores we dropped to 68% and then to start at level off at 8 cores and 64 percent so this is actually pretty interesting that flat line there I think indicates where the optimization stops right so if you have an extra you know 4 coursepack dog they're not really gonna be able as much at all few of those threads will just you know idle around 10% or so utilization and that's to be expected if Windows is gonna offset those background tasks right to those extra cores that aren't being utilized successfully by the game which will be averaging anywhere between 60 to 100 percent if the game is utilizing the CPU cores effectively and that's what you want to look for if your CPU ization is really low then you probably have either graphics card bottleneck or just poor optimization in general but we saw a pretty high utilization for a few of the cores and then the rest of them especially in that again 10 or 12 core territory were fairly low at around 10% and that's why average utilization continued to drop past 8 cores we saw it at 51% for 10 cores then 39% 29% 24% and 18% so that's literally just you know the average of all the core so the ones that aren't being utilized are again pulling an average utilization down and now with streaming in the background via OBS to youtube the same game GTA 5 and 1080p with the same presets we see a hundred percent utilization at two cores that's to be expected right don't buy and an older i3 to stream and play video games on that that's why you don't want to do that because the utilization will be maxed out it was actually maxed out too or pretty close to it at four cores and eight threads which is why Rison is actually such compelling offer right now because you can get you know six or eight cores which gives you plenty of lead way for streaming and gaming albeit maybe it's slightly lower frame rates but you do have that overhead available if you want to multitask also something else to note the flat trend that we saw with the no streaming option between six and eight cores shifted now between eight and ten cores so if you're wanting to do some heavy duty streaming maybe something else in the background on top of gaming then the Rison seven lineup would be pretty sweet for you because it's only gonna cost you around what an i7 would normally and you do get eight cores plus multi-threading support SMT and a MP's case so you do have again plenty of lead way for all that extra stuff you'd like to do in the background without compromising too much on the framerate in your game now the next game I tested was universe sandbox - I do have a dedicated video on this very game and how it leverages CPU horsepower you can check it out in this card right here but to keep things short and sweet it gets especially intense in some scenarios I try to run the earth and many moons simulation every single time I benchmark this and other videos just to keep things consistent and when you're seeing the screen recordings by the way the you know I use shadowplay when I capture my screen when you see those those aren't the official benchmarks my benchmark all my games without shadow play even activated in the GeForce experience app because I don't want that to affect my results in the long run I want things to be consistent again so I'm rerunning this benchmark in a few scenarios so you can actually see what's happening physically on screen with the game now even without streaming in the background with universe sandbox 2 at 2 cores and 4 threads this game almost no maxed out core usage we saw an average about 96 percent but several times throughout the earth and many moons simulation the CPUs all of them by the way all threads hit 100% utilization sometimes at the same time which wasn't good you do the same thing by the way in GTA 5 just not as frequently now what I bumped the core count to four so eight threads in total this time we didn't see too big of a dip in the utilization overall which I was surprised by because what I've noticed is when you have around eight cores when I benchmarked this game with arisin seven CPU let's say only about four of the cores are heavily utilized the other four just don't aren't really doing much in the background frankly but I was surprised to see all eight threads here still working pretty heavily hence that higher average this observation was validated with the transition I mean four and six scores we saw a huge dip in the average CPU utilization from ninety percent down to just 64 percent pretty much in line with gta5 at this point and this was a huge cut so what this tells me is that it really cares about four cores and if you have multi-threading even better it's gonna take advantage of that as well but when you jump up to six cores you're gonna have a significant drop in overall CPU utilization you'll stop a few course they're gonna be nearly maxed out and that just comes with you know how the game is optimized and then from then on now you can see it was pretty level at eight cores we saw 52% CPU average and then look at that all the way over to 18 cores just 38% CPU utilization so it really flatlines passed around 8 cores so I would call this one fairly significant now this next trend is actually pretty interesting I was expecting it not to run at all I was expecting to have issues streaming to YouTube it would be really choppy right my bitrate I think by the way was 5,000 which is pretty high most people streaming around 3 or 4 K so about 5,000 kilobits per second is a fairly significant figure especially when it comes to streaming with a 2 core processor and the game actually ran fine it ran really well and for some reason the CP utilization overall kept changing so with the earth and manymoon simulation I only had around 80 to 90 percent CP utilization you can see it here but when I did other things in the background like when I you know collided stars seep utilization would still max out at 100% and the framerate really wouldn't dip to much I was actually watching that too to see if we were seeing a performance hit and I did fairly well so despite seeing this 100% utilization for two cores it's still technically stable and the stream looks stable too when I was running it through my events panel if you bump it to four cores we see the exact same utilization we saw with 4 cores without streaming which was interesting I don't really know how to explain that technically the CF utilization should be a bit higher but maybe it's just off setting it right and cutting the performance of the game just a little bit so that you can maintain that stream quality the trend continues from 4 to 6 cores at 66% and 64 percent but then we finally see the delta write that Delta shows up it's usually about a 10% Delta and that's what you should expect an average or above-average stream to take advantage of CPU is especially if you have a multi multi core CPU so about a 10% utilization Delta when you had streaming on versus when you didn't and when universe and box two wasn't utilizing any more of those threads available to it basically Windows just assign those extra cores as extra threads to the stream itself which is why we didn't see a performance cut past that when we were streaming it's basically the you know the cliff where you don't really see a difference past that because you've already maxed out your utilization in universe and box 2 so here's what I want you to take away from this video and I'm gonna use an analogy from Brian at Tech yeah city he used this a while back in the livestream of his and I and I thought it was pretty clever you can only get so much power out of a fork or CPU right you could overclock it to 5 or 6 gigahertz on ln2 you're still only gonna get X performance out of it now the higher core count chips they're gonna be harder to overclock at least across the board and that's why frequency typically dips as core count increases they're usually inversely proportional but with that said if you could find a way to overclock an 18 core chip across all cores to 5 or 6 gigahertz then he would have just that much more power at your disposal you can't do that the four core chip unless you overclock that thing to 16 17 gigahertz in which case I'm good and I could probably start a fire and Bryant analogy was this it's the same for a car engine right you can only get so much power out of an inline 4 you're limited by the displacement of your engine that's what produces your torque and your horsepower over all this you know throw in something else like a turbo or a supercharger and you're gonna get more power from you in genetics you're pulling more air into the engine but that's kind of like your overclock right you can only get so much air through a certain size engine and when you increase the engines displacement and you increase the number of Pistons and number cylinders in an engine then you can increase your torque and horsepower proportionally so that's kind of what I want you guys to think about when you think about CPU cores if you want that extra breathing room that ability to expand to do more things in the background get the higher core count chip as we saw in this video anything past really 8 or 10 cores is really gonna benefit you much at all especially if you consider only gaming so by this point in the video you might be looking at me like Greg why don't you waste your time explaining all of that obvious stuff to me we all know that anything past 6 or 8 cores is pretty much worthless that's why we don't have consumer grade chips past that I think the real value in this video is in the graphs because you can take those graphs and kind of extrapolate them across multiple modern CPUs with some poor counts the reason why we don't have anything higher than an eight-core consumer grade chip right now is because it doesn't make sense for the average consumer it really doesn't gamers aren't going to lies more than eight cores unless they're running three games at the same time on the same machine or you're running virtual machines or you know you're doing something crazy like that same goes for content creators I would say the content creators don't need thread Ripper they don't need extreme CPUs from Intel they really don't and Adobe Premiere Pro for example doesn't utilize more than about six cores efficiently and that's that's just how it is so these CPUs are meant for totally different tasks but you can at least see how gaming and streaming a particular interact with the extra cores at their disposal if you like this video let me know by giving this one a thumbs up I appreciate it thumbs down for the opposite or if you hate everything about life now you click the red subscribe button if you haven't already also that bail notification icon so you get notified with videos like these go live this is science studio thanks for learning with us