Ryzen 5000 Series, Upgrade Routes

[RoyDanton]

Greetings,

this is my first Forumpost so please forgive me if this happens to be the wrong area to ask this question.

I'm currently debating whether it would be a good call to upgrade my Ryzen 2600 to a 5600x ahead of the upcoming DLC release, since after a few dozen hours of gameplay and economic advances my Performance suffers immensely, especially in dock areas. The GPU I'm relying on is the RTX 2070 (pretty confident that this isn't a problem considering it might even be bottlenecked in my setup).

What are your experiences with your Hardware in big X4 savegames? Would this provide the wanted uplift? Maybe someone has already bought a new Ryzen and can tell me about their opinion whether the upgrade was worth the money, or someone can pitch me an alternative upgrade route.

Kindest Regards
Roy Danton

[Scoob]

I think that'd be a solid CPU for X4 personally. I currently use a 3900X - which is pretty good - but the 20%+ (IPC + Clock speed) boost offered by say the 5900X has the potential to be almost worth it for X4. X4 relies heavily - I would argue a bit too heavily at times - on the performance of ONE Core. As such, it's often single-threaded performance that becomes a bottleneck. The 3600X will offer the same single Core performance and will perform just as well as the higher tier CPU's in most games.

My 3900X is a decent example. While playing X4 it will consistently hit it's 4.65Ghz peak boost on several cores, but not all at once. I can also observe it generally keeping one core over 4.5ghz at all time due to the particularly heavy load on one thread. I can limit the game to just three Cores and performance is not impacted at all as it's so reliant on that one heavy thread.

As an aside, I wanted to wait until Zen 3 before I upgraded. However, my system at the time - with the venerable 2600k - was acting a bit flaky so I got the 3900X (basically a complete new system) in the sales last year. I really wanted to hold out, but if I wanted to game, I needed a PC. I really should have just snagged a 3600 to tide me over, but I had ideas for other stuff I wanted to tinker with - video recording / encoding and the like, which the 3900X is good at.

Interstingly though, X4 is the ONLY game in my collection that demonstrates a HEAVY need for one thread and thus is the only one that is CPU limited in any way. So, the 3900X is a great CPU, but it can be weak in X4 as X4 does not really take advantage of multiple cores effectively, being so heavily reliant on that main thread.

Scoob.

[CBJ]

Hardware recommendations belong in the Off Topic forum, so I've moved this over for you.

With regard to X4 performance, as a general rule, higher clock speeds on 4+ cores will gain you more in the way of performance than throwing more cores at it. Memory speed can apparently also make some difference.

[RoyDanton]

Thanks a lot! Both for the help as well as the productive responses. I suppose it's settled then, I'm gonna pull the trigger. Once it's happening I'm gonna share the results.

[Scoob]

Thanks a lot! Both for the help as well as the productive responses. I suppose it's settled then, I'm gonna pull the trigger. Once it's happening I'm gonna share the results.

Cool, please do, it'll be interesting to hear how the new CPU performs for you. Your existing 2600 is a solid CPU, but I think the 3600X will be quite an improvement in X4. I think your existing 2070 will be totally fine too. I use the older 1070 which runs the game pretty well, albeit with a couple of the more demanding settings turned down a notch - screen space reflections on Medium and AA at just 2xMSAA.

Scoob.

[Shehriazad]

Well since the 5000 series is the new singletarget king...X4 would likely greatly benefit from this if you are a bit behind on single core performance.

The 2000 series was decent but the jump from 2000 series to 3000 series was an avg what, 15% performance gain? 5000 series easily slaps another 20% on top of a 3000 series chip so you would be very likely to notice it.

That said if you can't get one right now due to stock levels, don't sweat it.

[Terre]

Most B450 boards will receive a BIOS update in January so that they too can run 5000 series CPU's.

For those of those of you who have a B550 or B570 board, there is a BIOS update due next week, I believe it contains a timing adjustment for 4000 DDR4 memory, giving improved performance.

[vadiolive]

I know its whole off topic but believe egosoft need build some engine/case test scenarios benchmark while relay heavy CPU use
Its lack this kind software/game to stress CPU and whats egosoft win that? metrics all kinds metrics and free marketing

Just random idea probably cross not only my mind but severall others here

[thomahawk]

I must admit this information has been rather useful

I currently run an Intel 5930K which regularly sits at 4.1Ghz and the game runs but it really struggles with some of the more intensive background scripts.

The 5800x looks like it's going to be the CPU of choice for the higher sustained boost clock in multi-threaded workloads and I'm hoping with the new generation of consoles most games might be tuned for 8c/16t.

https://youtu.be/6x2BYNimNOU

[RoyDanton]

The 5800x looks like it's going to be the CPU of choice for the higher sustained boost clock in multi-threaded workloads and I'm hoping with the new generation of consoles most games might be tuned for 8c/16t.

https://youtu.be/6x2BYNimNOU

I'm unsure, like Steve says in this video, whether or not the minimal bonus performance in gaming is worth the high price tag or not, however I also don't know what kind of work you tend to do on your machine, so perhaps it's the right CPU for you. As to the argument with the new consoles and games potentially being tuned for higher cores, I believe I would set my money on a beefier GPU rather than a higher core count CPU right now. I would think that it will take gaming companies quite some time until they're going to really make use of higher core counts in a way that would suit the 5800X more than the 5600X.

[RoyDanton]

First of all I want to excuse the long time it took me to follow up with my promise, however the link below leads you to an unlisted YouTube playlist containing two videos, one recorded on my old 2600 and one on my new 5600X. I did this really quickly and didn't get to think of some sort of script or whatever, so the videos are all over the place. Also the information that MSI's Afterburner gives are quite simple for the 5600X, I would guess since it was so new at the time of recording. Furthermore I have almost no experience in video editing software, so if the quality is subpar I would kindly ask you to ignore that.

What did I gather from this experiment? PC upgrades, in the enthusiast area especially, are basically like going down a rabbit hole. I was really satisfied with my RTX 2070, now it seems to reach it's limit, always sitting around 100% and not letting the CPU go as hard as it potentially could. Maybe swapping my RAM for 16GB 3600Mhz sticks or just adding 16GB 3200 of the same brand would have given me a bigger performance boost in X4.

Nevertheless, the load time on big saves has dropped in quite an impressive manner, and over all my setup seems slightly more rounded. I do not regret my investment, but I wouldn't necessarily advise anyone to immediately upgrade to the new Ryzen 5000 series unless you own really old hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 3ptnihhESq

I hope someone finds this at least slightly interesting. I wish all of you the best. Kind regards, Roy Danton

[Max Bain]

First of all I want to excuse the long time it took me to follow up with my promise, however the link below leads you to an unlisted YouTube playlist containing two videos, one recorded on my old 2600 and one on my new 5600X. I did this really quickly and didn't get to think of some sort of script or whatever, so the videos are all over the place. Also the information that MSI's Afterburner gives are quite simple for the 5600X, I would guess since it was so new at the time of recording. Furthermore I have almost no experience in video editing software, so if the quality is subpar I would kindly ask you to ignore that.

What did I gather from this experiment? PC upgrades, in the enthusiast area especially, are basically like going down a rabbit hole. I was really satisfied with my RTX 2070, now it seems to reach it's limit, always sitting around 100% and not letting the CPU go as hard as it potentially could. Maybe swapping my RAM for 16GB 3600Mhz sticks or just adding 16GB 3200 of the same brand would have given me a bigger performance boost in X4.

Nevertheless, the load time on big saves has dropped in quite an impressive manner, and over all my setup seems slightly more rounded. I do not regret my investment, but I wouldn't necessarily advise anyone to immediately upgrade to the new Ryzen 5000 series unless you own really old hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... 3ptnihhESq

I hope someone finds this at least slightly interesting. I wish all of you the best. Kind regards, Roy Danton

That is so cool! Thank you!
I waited for some comparisons and I must say it is as expected. You get about 30-50% better fps. I am coming from a 3600 and want to go to a 5900. So I expect about 20-40% more fps.
Btw, have you activated the individual core overclocking feature in the BIOS? It shall boost the clocks individually improving performance a bit while still lowering power consumption. Dont know the exact name for it.
It is also possibe if you buy a Ryzen 5000 that you can activate smart access memory to increase CPU performance even more (it will then use GPU RAM).

You could also test 4.0. I read on steam that the performance has been increased a lot for some people.

[Max Bain]

Btw i saw in ur video that u have msaa 8x. Try using fxaa medium for drastically more fps.