Why Isn't Zen 5 Better at Gaming? Is Black Myth Wukong Optimized? August Q&A [Part 1]

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Video Index
00:00 - Welcome to Hardware Unboxed
00:41 - Ad-Spot
01:21 - Why is Zen 5's generational leap so small?
09:52 - How good does Intel's Arrow Lake need to be?
14:48 - Black Myth Wukong & 8GB GPUs
24:06 - Do we use HDR?
26:00 - Zen 5 memory issues?
28:03 - VRAM demands over time...
29:43 - Max price you would pay for Zen 5 over Zen 4?
34:29 - Outro

Why Is Zen 5 Disappointing for Gaming? Is Black Myth Wukong Optimized? August Q&A [Part 1]

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Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[Jzwiz]

9000 series launch was so bad that 7800x3d actually rose in price. Super annoying as this was the week i was driving to microcenter for my friends new pc

[Violet-ui]

Mindfactory in Germany sold in total about 250 Ryzen 9000 CPUs since launch (about half a month)
For comparison, they sold in total 70, 000 7800X3D CPUs (which averages to 1000 per week)

[petarpetrov]

Im so happy i upgraded to 5800x3d last year..

[PadPoet]

I've been checking prices almost daily since the release of the 9000 CPUs. The 7000 CPUs are steadily increasing in pricing. The 7700X, the 7800X3D, the 7950X, all of them. I wonder why...

[Ivan-prku]

From my understanding, Zen 5 was primary engineered for enterprise/workstation environments and that's where most of the transistor budget was spent on. Double the AVX-512 throughput (plus some ML-accelerating instructions) and wider fetch and decode stage that apparently only benefit dense multi-threaded workloads. Every other improvement is pretty much incremental at best for the casual user -- 50% more L1 data cache and slightly larger ROB size.
Zen 4 customers might need not apply for upgrade this generation. Let's hope Zen 6 will bring some more general performance boost along side.

[munkus]

AMD shouldn't have marketed the 9000x series to gamers.

[atariplayer]

Thank you Steve for your amazingly honest reviews 😊

[Henri-cm]

I would like to see benchmarks with Zen 5 on RPCS3 and how much the AVX512 improvements boost emulation performance, compared to last generation of cpus.

[liberteus]

Zen 5 is an unmitigated awful marketing disaster. Their whole marketing dept needs to be fired. Every opportunity is squandered, every single time. Dr Lisa, do something about it!!!

[Dempig]

Personally, HDR makes more of a difference than RTX to me. HDR is VERY important, I dont get whya lot of PC devs dont add it. Even windows auto hdr looks great to me.

[rentojad]

The funny part is even ZEN+ had higher gains vs ZEN in gaming, than ZEN 5 over ZEN 4.

[BigGreyDonut]

The games that have aged the best are most definitely not the games that targeted photorealism. The games that have aged the best have been games that used a more stylized art style and focused on things like lighting. A great example of this is Halo 3. 19:37

[Doug-muev]

So, as an owner of a high VRAM GPU I do agree that I would like to see higher res texture options but not at the cost of other visual enhancements (like ray tracing and path tracing). I think the dev of Black Myth made some great choices to ensure performance scales across a broad array of GPUs and including higher res textures options would likely have only led to reviewers selecting those options and claiming the game was “badly optimized”.

[LOLHoneybadger]

For the question on memory issues with Zen 5, that's something that bios updates will fix via AGESA updates. Lest we forget, Zen 4 had issue running 6000MHz RAM on a lot of chips & couldn't go above 2000MHz FClk when they first came out. Now we've got a majority if chops with memory controllers that can handle 6200-6400mhz RAM with 2100-2200FCLK With less issues. I'm running 2200MHz FCLK (at 1.2V soc) and 6200MHz CL28 @ 1.4V on my 7800X3D and it's happy as a clam. Took some tuning, but it's tight timings without crushing it with voltage.

[markcentral]

Thanks for the great show Steve & Tim

I feel as if there wasn't enough controversy though

I've got a quick fix though
Edits audio at 21:15 :
"Don't be poor....<cut>.... Buy an RTX 4080... <cut>....Get More Vram...<cut>...That is absolutely .. <cut> ... what we've ever said"

- posts on reddit -

[prosecanlik]

In 2022 when Zen 4 got released, 7600X in my country costed 300 euros, now the 9600X costs 370 euros... 7700X costed 400 euros, now 9700X over 500... crazy

[RurouTube]

For Zen5, the main issue is in the marketing. Their marketing have been terrible lately. While the numbers are correct, but it was done in a very biased way.
The product itself does have generational performance improvement, but most of it manifested in non gaming workload. In gaming, the performance increase is meh. The issue is that in the past few generations, we have been spoiled by CPU releases accompanied with clock speed increase and possibly cache increase (like with Intel 12th gen to 13/14th gen). Those 2 factors are actually the biggest contributor in gaming performance increase instead of the actual architectural improvement. If you ask someone that understand how CPU works, they will tell you that Zen5 is better and worthy of a new generation. Gamers don't care about that. They just want to see their FPS up by like 15 to 20%.
What also didn't help is the pricing. From gamers standpoint, it doesn't worth the price increase. The issue of course is the fact that this CPU actually can have a large generational improvement for some non gaming workloads (and even in some games!). I do think that the MSRP is just a bit too expensive (just a bit!), but gamers think that it is flat out too expensive. The difference in view come from the fact that I value the productivity side a lot since I also use my PC for work that definitely can take advantage of Zen5 improvement.

[DaKrawnik]

TSMC quotes that N4P further improves N4's performance by around 6%.

...compared to N5, N4P will deliver an 11% performance boost, a 22% improvement in power efficiency, and a 6% improvement in transistor density. Importantly for customers, TSMC says that N4P features a simplified (and cheaper) manufacturing process, requiring fewer masks and less wafer turnaround time.

[starrusgaming]

Actually, besides aiming for a wider base of 8gb GPUs, I the Wukong devs also had to make the game work on the PS5 too.

[Kneedragon]

AMD engineering ~ good.
AMD marketing and PR ~ not so good.
Q: Why is Zen 5 so disappointing?
A: Depends on who you ask. For you guys, with a gaming focus channel, it's really no better than Zen 4.
I am an old guy who plays with Linux. I do hardly any gaming ~ I have an Intel i7 6700 which is almost a decade old, and a GTX 750 Ti in it ~ which genuinely is a decade old. I just want a new computer, because this one is getting a bit old and skanky ~ like me. I don't compile a Linux kernel every day, I do it in bursts, and I guess it averages out to about once a week. At some point it gets to be like trying to use an HQ Holden from 1975 as your daily driver. It just gradually gets more difficult and expensive and inconvenient. Maybe the cross-over for cars is 30 years ~ the cross-over for computers is about ten.
I do some web-serfing, watch some youtube, and I compile a kernel every now and then, but I do play with VirtualBox and I have one copy of Windows and about a dozen guest installs of various flavours of Linux. I just like to keep an eye on things.
A 9950X with 64GB of RAM, and a 2TB gen-4 M.2 drive is going to suit me down to the ground. I am cynical about AI and the inclusion of a Neural Processing Unit, so getting the final generation before that shit becomes standard equipment, that's another reason to jump in here. This is a really nice point to do my once in a decade complete platform upgrade.
All the stuff that makes zen 5 a major disappointment for you guys ~ for me it's pretty much ideal. The fact it's not selling like hot-cakes and the price is going to drop ~ that's like the cherry on top! Just makes it even better.