We reside in some unusual occasions. For example you’ve got splashed the money and purchased your self a model new Ryzen 9 9950X processor. It is received 16 cores, 32 threads and it is a significantly succesful CPU, although not the very best for gaming. Properly, Asus reckons it has a repair for the latter within the type of a brand new Turbo Recreation Mode, that halves the variety of cores and quarters the variety of threads.
Particularly, what Turbo Recreation Mode (TGM) does is disable one of many CCDs (Core Complicated Dies) and SMT (Simultaneous Multithreading). In brief, it turns the likes of the 9950X into an 8-core, 8-thread processor. The concept is that some video games simply do not prefer to have threads scattered throughout separate dies or sharing any cores.
To see if so for any of the video games in our CPU benchmarking suite, I ran them afresh with the beta 2505 BIOS for the Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero motherboard. The check setup used a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB of DDR5-6000 CL28, a GeForce RTX 4070, and Home windows 23H2.
You’ll be able to see the outcomes for your self beneath however as a fast abstract, Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate 3 ran worse with TGM enabled, Metro Exodus and Complete Struggle: Warhammer 3 ran precisely the identical as with out it, and Homeworld 3 and Factorio ran higher with it on.
A blended bag however when Homeworld 3 solely ran 2% higher on common, and Factorio 5% faster, it raises a easy query: Is it value utilizing it in any respect?
One factor value contemplating is that it is a BIOS possibility and never one thing which you could flick on and off whereas in Home windows. TGM completely ruins the CPU’s content material creation capabilities so it is not a setting that you just’d ever use in that scenario.
And until you solely play a selected assortment of video games, the place TGM does assist, you’d get fairly aggravated having to reboot your PC each time you needed to play one thing completely different.
After I first reviewed AMD’s twin CCD Zen 5 chips, the Ryzen 9 9900X and 9950X, I observed that the really useful energy settings truly made issues worse. AMD said that one ought to use the Balanced energy profile within the outdated Management Panel after which Balanced or Greatest Efficiency in Home windows settings.
This configuration would permit AMD’s drivers to activate core parking on the second CCD when a recreation is detected. In different phrases, flip the 9950X into an 8-core, 16-thread chip from the attitude of the sport. I discovered that this did not truly assist and the overview efficiency figures had been collected utilizing Excessive Efficiency within the Management Panel (i.e. no core parking).
Conscious of the truth that there have been quite a few updates to AMD’s drivers, Home windows, and AM5 motherboard BIOS recordsdata since then, I went again to see if the really useful energy profile settings had been higher.
Properly, they don’t seem to be, or on the very least, they don’t seem to be with my configuration—Excessive Efficiency/Greatest Efficiency nonetheless produces higher outcomes than Balanced/Greatest Efficiency, though the hole between them is now quite a bit smaller than it was initially.
Now, I’ve solely examined 5 video games, which is a tiny pattern, and I am positive there are video games on the market that might genuinely profit from Turbo Recreation Mode being enabled. Nevertheless, having to leap out and in of the BIOS to change it’s a drag and I can not see many opting to make use of it often if the general change it brings is zero.
I suppose it is good to have the choice to shortly shut off one CCD and disable SMT by choosing one possibility, reasonably than having to delve into the BIOS choices and do all that manually, however it’s a setting for the only a few of us. Everybody else ought to simply depart it alone and revel in your AMD CPU as AMD meant—chock filled with cores, threads, and gaming goodness.
