Question True PC Gaming Performance - Intel or AMD?

[old_rager]

Which PC system would be faster for PC Gaming?

System 1: AMD THX 3970X running duel PCIe4 SLI GPU's with the game and OS running from 4 x PCIe4 NVMe's on a PCIe4 raid card running raid 0?

System 2: Intel Core i9-9900KS running comparable duel PCIe3 SLI GPU's with the game and OS running from 4 x PCIe3 NVMe's on a PCIe 3 raid card running raid 0 (I'm not even sure if this can be done when in SLI mode?)?

Would the extra PCIe lanes going to the AMD processor result in a faster gaming experience to the end user, or would the Intel processor not being able to fully utilise it's PCIe lanes in the SLI mode - let alone whether it could also handle extra lanes for a raid card?!?

Just curious as to how much extra gaming benefit does system AMD get, if any, you would get over a correspondingly built Intel system?

 

[TerryLaze]

Games are designed for consoles without any sli or raid features even remotely implemented,most of the games even expect to be played from a blu ray disc with only some files being copied to the hard drive for caching.
This might change in the future considering the hardware of the new consoles but lacking a crystal ball nobody can answer you on if that will change anything.

 

[Phaaze88]

1)It's a tie. I'm dead serious. The 2 cpus trade blows.
2-A)No.
2-B)No. Not with 2080Ti SLI anyway. A single 2080Ti oversaturates PCIE 3.0 in x8 mode.
3)None, but you're comparing gaming performance on HEDT VS mainstream platforms. That's not fair to either the 3970X nor the 9900KS.
The priority of the Threadripper system isn't gaming at all - not to say you can't - but fun time is an afterthought for such a setup.
The priority of the 9900K system is gaming - sorta - I see it as more of a jack of all trades.

 

[sizzling]

What resolution and Hz is the monitor? Do you know all the limitations and pitfalls of SLi as generally it’s advised against these days.

 

[old_rager]

"1)It's a tie. I'm dead serious. The 2 cpus trade blows. "

Nah, that's not an answer - where's the proof?

 

[Nemesia]

Nah, that's not an answer - where's the proof?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV5zVeb8lFQ

 

[old_rager]

"What resolution and Hz is the monitor? Do you know all the limitations and pitfalls of SLi as generally it’s advised against these days. "

Monitor Hz is not in the picture here. You have to imagine you have a monitor that can cope with whatever is thrown at it. What is going to give you the best FPS at the same image quality?

 

[old_rager]

Games are designed for consoles without any sli or raid features even remotely implemented,most of the games even expect to be played from a blu ray disc with only some files being copied to the hard drive for caching.
This might change in the future considering the hardware of the new consoles but lacking a crystal ball nobody can answer you on if that will change anything.

Nah, I'm looking for fastest game experience. Load times, FPS all at the same image quality.

Which processor platform would render the better Gaming PC?

 

[Phaaze88]

Nah, that's not an answer - where's the proof?

My mistake:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKYY37ss3lY

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tzTMN6-qU

 

[sizzling]

"What resolution and Hz is the monitor? Do you know all the limitations and pitfalls of SLi as generally it’s advised against these days. "

Monitor Hz is not in the picture here. You have to imagine you have a monitor that can cope with whatever is thrown at it. What is going to give you the best FPS at the same image quality?

Its is all part of the overall setup. For example 4k 60Hz you only really need to achieve 60fps but will need serious GPU power in new AAA games. In this scenario an i5 or R5 will perform nearly identically to the CPU's you are looking at as the CPU is just not as important. However at the other end of the scale 1080p 240Hz trying to achieve the very hightest FPS will maximise any differences between CPU's. Even at 1440p you are most likely going to be GPU limited long before the CPU so additional CPU horsepower gives negligible performance improvement.

SLi and Crossfire support from games has been in decline, many games dont support them and of those that do support them the performance gains can be less than 30% which is a pretty poor return on an additional 100% gpu cost. Then you have the additional chance of micro stutter and driver issues. Generally multi gpu setups are not recommended. Its definitely worth researching otherwise you may end up very disappointed with the performance for the price.

 

[old_rager]

SLi and Crossfire support from games has been in decline, many games dont support them and of those that do support them the performance gains can be less than 30% which is a pretty poor return on an additional 100% gpu cost. Then you have the additional chance of micro stutter and driver issues. Generally multi gpu setups are not recommended. Its definitely worth researching otherwise you may end up very disappointed with the performance for the price.

Tom's hardware published a story but Paul Alcorn recently (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html ) where it stated that the Best CPU for gaming was the Intel Core i9-9900KS which had a score of 100. The next best AMD CPU, the THX 3970X was rated at 96% of the Intel Core i9-9900KS. So in my mind, how much of a difference is the 4% between the top of the range Intel and AMD CPU's. How much of an effect does this 4% have on FPS, load times, etc?

My son is wanting to get a high end gaming rig. Where I was going with this is, when it comes to the whole gaming experience, how much of a difference does the AMD PCIe4 architecture (double the increased throughput per lane) in conjunction with the extra spare PCIe lanes you get with the TRX40 series motherboard have over Intel's current PCIe3 limitation - and is it more than enough to make up for the 4% difference between the top of the range AMD and Intel CPU's?

For example, these new RTX 3080Ti's they're talking about are going to be PCIe 4 cards - increasing throughput from 16GBs to 32GBs per X16 slot. Additionally, increasing storage access to somewhere around 15GBs transfer speeds as opposed to probably 7-8GBs that would be probably the best from an Intel system, surely that has got to more than make up for 4% difference in the CPU's?

So this is more or a theoretical question, rather than maybe practical. But it would be nice to know how much each aspect of a system build impacts the actual delivery of the game the user? Then people might be able to correctly 'size' their systems appropriately so that they are getting the most efficient use of the system with respect to what they're wanting to use it for?

Hoping this makes sense? It's also Dad vs Son - so Dad's hoping that the AMD system will provide a better overall gaming experience cf. to the current best Intel system one could build.

Wish I had the money to test it for myself, but alas, I do not. Not sure how to get this question to Paul Alcorn as I'd like to hear what he thinks... 😉

 

[old_rager]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV5zVeb8lFQ

Have a look at the post I sent to Sizzling above, do you think this Vid takes the information I've contained here into account. That would have been CPU vs CPU on exactly the same system config - all PCIe3 to ensure it was an eggs with eggs comparison. But it's not an eggs v's eggs comparison, there's much more capability in an AMD X570 system that when Intel can bring to the table, so this I believe doesn't answer the question.

 

[old_rager]

My mistake:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKYY37ss3lY

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2tzTMN6-qU

Dude, seriously? You paste in 2 x 30 minute vids for me to have to watch to see if you've even taken into consideration what needs to be understood before declaring which environment is better?

You can do better than that... 😒

 

[Phaaze88]

Dude, seriously? You paste in 2 x 30 minute vids for me to have to watch to see if you've even taken into consideration what needs to be understood before declaring which environment is better?

You can do better than that... 😒

I guess I should've posted the vids with the start and end timestamps of the gaming benchmarks instead... doesn't look like it would change your mind though.
It's not my fault that the Threadripper benchmarks are like 80% professional applications and 20% gaming - there's a reason for that.
Gamers are not the targeted audience for that kind of system; It's for a workstation.
The few minutes of gaming benchmarks tells those individuals that they can actually get some decent gaming performance if they wanted to as a small bonus - perhaps play a little during break time, or even play while you work.

That you are comparing gaming performance between a HEDT platform to a mainstream one raises more questions than answers: Why isn't HEDT being compared to HEDT, and mainstream VS mainstream?
-Why not compare the 3970X's gaming performance to Intel's top HEDT chip, the i9-10980XE?
-Why not compare the 9900KS's gaming performance to AMD's top mainstream cpu, the Ryzen 9 3950X?

You want to put together the best possible gaming system for your son:
-3970X + TR40 mobo + at least 32GBs of 3733mhz ram + at least 1 PCIE Gen 4 SSD + 2080Ti SLI = well over 5k worth of hardware
-9900KS + Z390 mobo + at least 32GBs of 3600mhz ram + at least 1 PCIE Gen 3 SSD + 2080Ti SLI = over 3k worth of hardware
A user with build 2 performs within 10% of the other using build 1 for games.

Then there's also Intel's 10th gen cpus launching at the end of this month. The i9-10900K will be Intel's new gaming star...

 

[old_rager]

You want to put together the best possible gaming system for your son:
-3970X + TR40 mobo + at least 32GBs of 3733mhz ram + at least 1 PCIE Gen 4 SSD + 2080Ti SLI = well over 5k worth of hardware
-9900KS + Z390 mobo + at least 32GBs of 3600mhz ram + at least 1 PCIE Gen 3 SSD + 2080Ti SLI = over 3k worth of hardware
A user with build 2 performs within 10% of the other using build 1 for games.

Then there's also Intel's 10th gen cpus launching at the end of this month. The i9-10900K will be Intel's new gaming star...

Phaaze88, much better - but not quite there. Without trying to understand the why's and wherefores, I'm trying to determine how much of a theoretical difference there'd be in FPS - and because we don't want to limit ourselves to current technology (no PCIe4 GPU's yet), where's the best investment? Having said that, I'd also love to know the theoretical difference that increasing the underlying subsystem (PCIe4 over PCI3), how much of a difference can/does this make.

I'm starting to think that no-ones done this kind of correlation. Dual or single GPU, v's 2 x NVMe PCIe 3 cards (can't do 4 with single x16 GPU as it doesn't have enough spare PCIe lanes to do 2 x X16 card's in the a system at once. The TRX40 with various Threadripper CPU's can with the sTRX40 can have between 40 and 72 spare PCIe4 lanes - that's at least 2 x X16's and 1 x X8, or 2 x X4. 1 x X16 slot can easily take 4 x NVME's in raid 0 taking storage access on the AMD system to be double the read speeds of anything that the PCIe3 system can achieve. Surely this opening up of those access times (especially in light of next Gen console load times being extremely reduced, surely there must be more benefit here than what you'd get with 4% processor differentiation?

This is what I'm trying to understand. Am I making sense here, or am I off the planet in someway, shape or form?!?

BTW, completely agree that Intel's about to release is 10th gen processors which would have to be PCIe4 compliant - they'd have to be. How many spare PCI'e lanes that the the processors will have will be a totally different question. NVidia's also about to release their RTX 3080Ti as well as AMD and their Big Navi. We are also about to see AMD release ZEN 3 which we've been advised will work on current X570 boards with a firmware revision - so maybe the same when it comes to Threadripper CPU's.

The future looks very bright for PC enthusiast especially with the focus heading towards 4K gaming at higher frame rates. We should see HDMI 2.1 become the new media transfer standard (as opposed to HDMI 2.0b - not talking about DSP here at all). There are currently some large screen 4K TV's able to go to 120Hz.

So imagine with me if you would, 2 x X16 PCIe4 GPU's in SLI (might become a flavour again in order to get 4K gaming running properly as I can tell you, from an encoding/transcoding perspective, there is a massive jump in processing requirements when going from 1080p to 4K - which I found out the hard way... 😭). Add to that, 4 x PCIe4 NVMe's which can theoretically reach 8GBps each (not there yet). Put them in raid 0 - and then maybe add some DDR5 memory (which is probably 18 months off), and the future of Gaming looks very bright indeed!!! 😁

 

[Nemesia]

At the moment. In the present moment. Right now. Not in the future dude. Now. The 9900KS is the best gaming CPU. Period.

Do you seriously think anyone who wants a gaming system will buy a 3000 dollars threadripper instead of a normal 9900K at 500 dollars? Even that 1500 dollars KS is half the price.

 

[old_rager]

At the moment. In the present moment. Right now. Not in the future dude. Now. The 9900KS is the best gaming CPU. Period.

Do you seriously think anyone who wants a gaming system will buy a 3000 dollars threadripper instead of a normal 9900K at 500 dollars? Even that 1500 dollars KS is half the price.

Yes, as a gaming CPU - the Intel CPU has it by 4% according to Paul Alcorn. But the processing requirements for a game and its subsequent presentation to the user goes well beyond the CPU - there's so much more going on that just what the CPU does alone.

And you don't need to go to the 'enth degree TRX processor. Unfortunately Paul Alcorn in the referenced article didn't evaluate the 3950X CPU which requires an X570 motherboard which is much cheaper and still provides an extra 16 PCIe lanes x 2 times the through put. This Ryzen chip is supposed to be pretty fast, but isn't anything like $3K mark, it's more like around $720 in the US, as opposed to the $550 for the Intel chip (let alone going to the $1500 you have referenced).

So with that chip, and the PCIe4 subsystem that will also grow with Zen 3 and everything else, which system would be quicker in the end I wonder?

 

[Nemesia]

The 3950X is a Zen2 16 cores 32 threads CPU on the AM4 socket. Not a Threadripper. This is why it was not included in the article.

 

[old_rager]

The 3950X is a Zen2 16 cores 32 threads CPU on the AM4 socket. Not a Threadripper. This is why it was not included in the article.

Actually, my bad, the article does have the 3950X - and it comes in at 5.2 % lower than i9900KS - which I can't find pricing on these days. So let's go with the i9900KF - as that was the one my son was thinking about getting (same as i9900KF but without internal GPU). It came out out at 97.1% cf. 94.8%. Therefore the difference between the two CPU's is really only 2.5% thereabouts.

So taking that into account, which system would offer better gaming performance then?

Just as an added extra, now that the Intel i109900K has been released (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/processors/core/i9-processors/i9-10900k.html ) and sorry to say, still PCIe 3.0 and only 16 free PCIe lanes... Like, really?!? 😭😭😭