Question Which CPU should I get if I play RTS games with a lot of units ?

[runningw]

I know that for overall gaming the Ryzen 9800X3D is the go-to solution but most reviews do not benchmark RTS games such as StarCraft series, Age of Empires series, etc. If I play those games (not 1v1, usually 4v4 or so), should I still go with a 9800X3D or do I have better options?
Additionally, do these games rely on single core performance or cache space?

 

[TerryLaze]

Well the two you mention are ancient and will be single core...

Newer RTS's's can use a lot of cores for some things but not for everything.
The cache will still be relevant for displaying all the stuff on screen at high FPS but not for the computing of the units and all of that.

You can check what the games you do have now are doing by running process hacker, double click on the game exe and go to the threads tab, it will show how many threads do how much work (cpu usage) .

 

[runningw]

Well the two you mention are ancient and will be single core...

Newer RTS's's can use a lot of cores for some things but not for everything.
The cache will still be relevant for displaying all the stuff on screen at high FPS but not for the computing of the units and all of that.

You can check what the games you do have now are doing by running process hacker, double click on the game exe and go to the threads tab, it will show how many threads do how much work (cpu usage) .

Thanks! In cases where my games rely on single core performance, should I go with 9800x3d or 9950x or Core 9 285k?

 

[logainofhades]

I would say the x3d due to poor multicore support for such old games.

 

[runningw]

I would say the x3d due to poor multicore support for such old games.

Don't Core 9 285k and 9950x have better single core performance? Or since 9800x3d does not fall behind much in single core performance, its other features compensated for the slightly lower single core performance?

 

[geofelt]

Here is a list of some single thread ratings as run on the cpu-Z bench app.
The very top would seem to be the i9-14900KS which scores 957.
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/ump56p/1
The 9950x is the top ryzen processor at 887.

 

[logainofhades]

Don't Core 9 285k and 9950x have better single core performance? Or since 9800x3d does not fall behind much in single core performance, its other features compensated for the slightly lower single core performance?

Games are different than Synthetic apps. For instance, I am a WoW player, and it only uses 4 cores. A 5800x3d, unless you spent a lot of time tuning ram, would walk all over a 12900k, but in non gaming tasks, the 12900k would come out on top.

 

[TechyInAZ]

It depends greatly on how sensitive the game is to cache or compute. Some games are more compute bound while others are more cache bound. Though, as a general rule of thumb, the older the game is, normally the less cache bound it is and it is more compute hungry. However, this only applies if the game hasn't seen any serious graphical upgrades or API updates since it was first released. As Logain pointed towards, WoW is surprisingly cache-sensitive despite being a very old game (since it gets updated a lot).

I wouldn't worry too much about the CPU honestly. Any mid-range CPU should do fine. I'd recommend the Ryzen 5 7600X3D or Core i5-13600K. Just remember that higher core count's don't get you anywhere since RTS games like StarCraft are heavily single core bound.

The max you really want to go with on AMD specifically is the 8 core chips, since the 12 and 16 core models use multiple chiplets which introduces extra scheduling complications you won't want to have. Not to mention those cores will be useless for you anyways.

I'd also recommend looking at StarCraft 2 benchmarks online.