81–90 of 126 posts
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I am still waiting on evidence that memory architecture helps anyone.
I'm pretty sure memory is still the main bottleneck in the vast majority of operations, and why the X3D is such a monster with so much L3 cache. There's almost nothing that doesn't benefit from having twice the memory bandwidth.
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It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%). That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
That's just overall desktop and laptop sales though, right? So home multimedia desktop PCs could be falling off a cliff, business desktop PCs could be dropping, and gaming PCs could be growing a bit and the overall market of desktops could still be net down, right? The overall market doesn't give us enough resolution to determine the health of gaming PC sales IMO. There's too many other possible ways we get to that s…
It used to be much easier to justify adding a dedicated GPU to the desktop's people where already getting, but when everyone is buying laptops that’s dying. As shown by end of generation mid range cards like the 4060 (2 years old, nothing newer) being relatively less common than they used to be on Steam.
#1 Laptop 4060 4.99%, #3 desktop 4060 4.41%. Overall gaming desktop PC’s are still more common than gaming laptops, but the trend is very much down. #2 is the 4 year old 3060.
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I don't fully follow this, so what has been gained with the new models? I seem to remember you'd need dedicated industrial cooling for the 14700k. Does the new model at least pump much less power?
> I seem to remember you'd need dedicated industrial cooling for the 14700k. Those CPUs run hot, but it got exaggerated a lot online. It’s not hard to handle their heat with a good air cooler (even some of the $50 units like the Peerless Assassin) or a run of the mill closed loop water cooler. There are a lot of old notions in the gaming community that you need to keep CPUs under arbitrary temperature thresholds or t…
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At some point you have to blame the driver model on Windows. People have been saying "it's the drivers" for 30 years. Also most of this is intentional first party behavior from Microsoft. Windows intentionally periodically wakes from sleep to do communication (for notifications etc.) Microsoft's advice last I checked is to not store sleeping laptops running windows in laptop bags. There's a ton of other decisions the…
> At some point you have to blame the driver model on Windows. Serious question, specifically what is wrong with the driver model in terms of this situation? What change would you propose to solve this? Why isn't it a matter of the device manufacturers churning out crappy and poorly tested devices and solely Microsoft's fault? I do agree, Microsoft should probably make it easier to point out "hey this device is causi…
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> At some point you have to blame the driver model on Windows. Serious question, specifically what is wrong with the driver model in terms of this situation? What change would you propose to solve this? Why isn't it a matter of the device manufacturers churning out crappy and poorly tested devices and solely Microsoft's fault? I do agree, Microsoft should probably make it easier to point out "hey this device is causi…
S1 S2 S3 S4 sleep modes and what happened to the most useful of them ;)
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It’s arguing desktop gaming is dying not PC gaming. Q4 2024 shipped 13.6 million desktops (down 1.8%) vs 53.2 million laptops up (6.8%). That trend of declining Desktops vs increasing laptops has been steady since 2010. There’s still plenty of desktops to justify major investments by gaming companies, but that’s not guaranteed long term.
That's a strange movement of a goal post, not to mention that using percentages conveniently hides whether PC Gaming as a whole is growing or shrinking. Hows your post related to anything here?
“Games requiring desktop cases looking like a rainbow aquarium with top everything will become a niche, in today's mobile computing world”
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I'm pretty sure memory is still the main bottleneck in the vast majority of operations, and why the X3D is such a monster with so much L3 cache. There's almost nothing that doesn't benefit from having twice the memory bandwidth.
Did you read the article?
> Lion Cove suffers harder with backend memory latency, but far less from frontend latency. Part of this can be explained by Zen 4’s stronger data-side memory subsystem. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D I previously tested on has 96 MB of L3 cache on the first die, and has lower L3 latency than Lion Cove in Intel’s Arrow Lake platform. Beyond L3, AMD achieves better load-to-use latency even with slower DDR5-5600 36-36-36-89 memory. Intel’s interconnect became more complex when they shifted to a chiplet setup, and there’s clearly some work to be done.
They only compared three games of roughly the same genre in terms of mechanics which is not exactly a representative benchmark either, even for games. The average shooter with a fixed map and say, Minecraft, have vastly different memory access demands.
Meanwhile, the Zen 5 is only 47 cycles, and if you get the X3D variant, you get a TON of that L3 cache, which just turbo-charges games.
How did Intel allow such a major performance regression in their L3 cache?
> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty. I understand doing this for the purpose of specifically analyzing the P-core microarchitecture in isolation. However this does make the test less interesting for potential customers. I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CP…
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> Which is why AMD seems to be showing everyone a better path by simply using process optimizations and execution time optimization choices with the same zen cores. Funny you would say that, because AMD X3D CPUs have cores with 3D Cache, and cores without, and massive scheduling problems because of this.
Which is just caching/locality asymmetries, knowledge of which has been at least partially integrated into schedulers for a couple decades now. It just goes to show how hard scheduling actually is. But also, you call it a 'massive' problem and its actually somewhat small in comparison to what can happen with vastly different core types in the same machine. Many of those cores also have quite large cache differences t…
I don't think (but could be wrong) that C++ has a platform independent way of doing this either. I'm not even sure if such an API is exposed from the Windows or linux kernel (though I'd imagine it is).
That to me is the bigger issue here. I can specify which core a thread should run on, but I can't specify what type of core it should run on.