A Look At Linux Gaming Performance Scaling On The Threadripper 2950X

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Look At Linux Gaming Performance Scaling On The Threadripper 2950X

On Monday when the launch embargo expired on the Threadripper 2950X and Threadripper 2990WX I hadn't run any gaming benchmarks since, well, most games even on Windows can't scale out to 32 threads let alone 64 threads... Especially on Linux. It's far more practical getting these Threadripper 2 processors if you want to compile with 32 or 64 make jobs -- among many other common multi-threaded Linux workloads -- versus using this $899 or $1799 processor for a Linux gaming system. But if you are curious how Linux games scale with the Threadripper 2950X, here are some benchmark results when testing both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=26714

[chithanh]

Michael
A few folks have discovered that the NVidia graphics driver has scaling problems when going up to 64 threads on Windows.

https://www.golem.de/news/32-kern-cpu-threadripper-2990wx-laeuft-mit-radeons-besser-1808-136016.html

Did you notice that on Linux too?

[Michael]

Michael
A few folks have discovered that the NVidia graphics driver has scaling problems when going up to 64 threads on Windows.

https://www.golem.de/news/32-kern-cpu-threadripper-2990wx-laeuft-mit-radeons-besser-1808-136016.html

Did you notice that on Linux too?

Haven't ran any gaming tests yet on 2990WX as not really relevant, especially on Linux... But back at Italy tech day, AMD did say a few games had known issues with handling 64 threads.

[chithanh]

Yes, games have issues. That is already known.

But the NVidia driver specifically also showed issues, as the Golem test found the 1080Ti behind the Vega64 on the 2990WX.

[schmidtbag]

I'm surprised it scaled up so nicely - I thought the 16 and 32 core configurations were going to really suffer in performance, but apparently not. It's pretty obvious that 32 cores would run slower than 16 (due to the dies without direct memory access, in the event they ever get utilized in the game) but the performance losses as a result really weren't that bad.

[Dr. Righteous]

Wow.
I like computer gaming as much as the next guy but since most game development is targeted at consoles, scaling across multiple cores isn't given much priority. So for the subject of gaming. Meh. But what is exciting is the boon this is to content creators, videographers, and the like that need as much crunching power as they can get.
If you are working under looming dead lines to render out computer graphics or 4k (or 8k) video the more core/threads the better. The codecs workload scales smoothly across multiple cores. The boon for game development is Vulkan but unfortunately most developers are ignoring it since they don't want to abandon old coding paradigms.

[torsionbar28]

We have intel to thank for this quad-core performance stagnation.

[cybertraveler]

Very interesting benchmarks, thanks.

I'm looking forward to seeing the first AAA game written in Rust. Rust has language features to make it safer and easier to implement parallelism in your code.

[M@GOid]

8 core Ryzen 2700, here I go.

[profoundWHALE]

Stuff like this makes me think that games will be updated so that they don't use more than 8 threads, rather than being updated to work well with more.