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Avowed and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 run faster on a fully unlocked AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

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As I wrote in my PC Performance Analysis, Avowed is one of the few games that can use more than 8 CPU threads. So, I wondered whether the game would run faster with a fully unlocked AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. And the answer is yes.

But what do I mean by saying a “fully unlocked” AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D? Since upgrading our main PC gaming system to an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D, we have disabled its second CCD. That’s the CCD that does not have a 3D V-Cache. The reason I’ve disabled it is because some games can use by default the second CCD, something that will hinder performance. Plus, a lot of games could not take advantage of more than 6 CPU cores, so there was no point in running the CPU with both CCDs. Things though may soon change.

Before continuing, here are the specs of our PC gaming system.

  • AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
  • Gigabyte Motherboard X670E AORUS MASTER
  • G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 32GB DDR5 RAM at 6000Mhz
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Founder’s Edition
  • Corsair PSU HX Series 1200W
  • Windows 10 64-bit
  • NVIDIA GeForce 572.16 WHQL driver

So after unlocking the second CCD, I tried running Avowed. And, to no one’s surprise, the game defaulted to the second CCD. Thankfully, though, there is a program that allows you to prioritize the CCD with the 3D V-Cache. This program is called “vcache-tray”, and I highly recommend downloading it. And yes, it works.

Here is a screenshot at 720p/Epic Settings/No RT. The first six CPU cores are those of CCD0 (that’s the CCD with the 3D V-Cache) and the six bottom CPU cores (CPU9-CPU16) are those of CCD1.

Avowed with AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D

Now the good news is that in our CPU-bound scene, we saw a 15% performance increase over the 8cores/8threads configuration. That’s a pretty healthy performance boost. Compared to the 8cores/16threads config, we only see an 8-9% performance boost. Still, this is one of the rare cases in which a game runs noticeably faster on an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D when using both of its CCDs. You can also see that the game used the 7950X3D at around 74% (so there is still room for improvement here).

chart

I’ve also tried Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. And yes, this is another game that benefits from the two CCDs of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D. Without SMT, my minimum framerate increased from 92FPS to 115FPS (that’s a 25% performance increase). The performance difference between the 8cores/16threads and 16threads/16threads configs is around 13%. Pretty solid results in my opinion.

chart (1)

So there you have it. To be honest, I’m pretty impressed with the CPU scaling of Avowed. After all, this is an Unreal Engine 5 game. A lot of people have criticized this engine. But, in the right hands, UE5 can scale incredibly well.

Stay tuned for more!