PC Do PC Upgrades Improve Performance?

Doomofman

Doomofman

Well-known member
I'm upgrading my CPU soon (not for 7D2D :P) and it got me thinking if I would see any performance improvement in 7D2D as a side effect from the upgrade. I'm often below 60FPS with maybe 50% GPU and 5/10% CPU usage.

So my question is, is there a certain level of PC hardware where you just wont see any performance improvement in 7D2D from upgrades?

As in, is it that once you have say maybe like a recent gen i5 or i7 (or AMD equivalent) where we're just at the mercy of the games optimization and/or settings changes? 

 
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I think when you get your hardware  high enough it will become the law of diminishing returns. By that I mean you will get some improvent, maybe small, for a lot of outlay.

For example I am running an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, If I wish to upgrade that CPU it will cost a lot of money just to get a 5950X which will be less than 5% to 10% improvement, In an ideal World, in some scenarios little or no improvement.

it all depends on how much you have to spend and whether you can use some of the hardware you hav e. If you go high end GPU there is a strong possibilty that you might need to factor in a higher rated PSU.

In answer to your question, there is a limit

 
Over the weekend, I was just playing around with how single thread speed and multi-thread speed affect FPS. While keeping the graphics card and the memory speed the same, I changed the number of available cores between 4 and 6, and the CPU clock speed between 4Ghz and 5.2Ghz per core.

My findings was that additional cores did appear to be used - but had no discernible impact on FPS. The core speed did appear to impact minimum FPS, but not significantly raise average FPS. 

Single thread performance therefore does seem to impact the performance of the game, but not linearly, and there are other bottlenecks in play. I'd say that as long as your server is well speced, then an upgrade would see some improvement to your minimum FPS while in cities and there are a few zombies around.  

 
Doomofman said:
I'm upgrading my CPU soon (not for 7D2D :P) and it got me thinking if I would see any performance improvement in 7D2D as a side effect from the upgrade. I'm often below 60FPS with maybe 50% GPU and 5/10% CPU usage.
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The fact that you mentioned you're only using 5-10% of your current CPU (during gameplay, I assume) you're highly unlikely to see any noticeable improvement. This is obviously case-by-case, though, when it comes to PC upgrades and game performance. Right now my bottleneck is the GPU (always near or at 100% during gameplay), but my CPU sits pretty at around 15%. As soon as they become available, I'll be looking for a GPU.

 
Regarding my experiences the best update you could get for 7 Days To Die is more RAM and a SSD. 4 GB VRAM for 1080p. But I wouldn't buy a modern GPU just for this game. I have a GTX 780 Ti. CPU is a Core i7. 32 GB RAM. I don't use RWG for creating 8k maps (RWG still needs optimization).    

But the first step if you have performance problems: Deactivate Dynamic Mesh. If you need even more performance, deactivate shadows.

 
grendelwolf said:
But the first step if you have performance problems: Deactivate Dynamic Mesh. If you need even more performance, deactivate shadows.
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^^This - And remember you need to restart the game after deactivating the mesh. Also deactivating shadows, even indoors, when you're getting low frames can make a huge difference, just flip them on/off based on the situation as you don't need to restart the game.

 
Vampirenostra said:
I wonder what kind of cpu the ts has so it is only loaded by 10% in a cpu bound game...
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9700K currently, though upgrading to a 12700k soon.

And just as I've seen it mentioned, it's not that the game is unplayable or anything for me, was just curious if my CPU upgrade or any other upgrade for that matter) would yield me any improvement in 7 Day and it looks like I'm already past the point where I can make it run any better with hardware

 
Vampirenostra said:
I wonder what kind of cpu the ts has so it is only loaded by 10% in a cpu bound game...
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That´s the overall load on all cores/threads. You are CPU bound if one core is at 100% and 7 other cores and the 8 logical threads are at 0%. Overall usage is still pretty low but your still limited by the CPU. Most games do rely on single core performance. That´s a bit simplified though, other cores are usually used also, but one core is doing most of the work.

 
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7DTD is largely a cpu bound game. However that doesn't mean it will use as many cores as you throw at it, generally it won't use any more than 6 and of the 6 in use 1 or 2 cores will be 100% utilised. This is where most bottlenecks for this game come from. So while you won't see any benefit from more cores if you already have a 4-6 core cpu already, you will see an improvement from moving to a newer cpu with stronger single core performance. If you're gpu bound it might not get you any improvements in avg fps however,  but it will give you higher 1% & .1% low numbers. So 4-6 cores is where core count stops proving performance improvements with the cpu. 

The limit for gpus depends on which gpu you have and what monitor resolution and frame rate you're running. Example a 1080ti more than 4 years old at this point will start to become bottlenecked at 1440p. For the current generation anything more than a 3060 or 3070 won't do anything for you at 1440p. Video options in the game can also determine the limits. 3090's will still be cpu bound at 4k amazingly and won't become gpu bound until you run 6-8k resolution.

 
Games nowadays depend more on the GPU than the CPU. upgrading your CPU may not do you much good.

Having said that, there are so many variables involved that you might see a performance increase with a CPU upgrade. With cpus, faster is better.

Most of my problems I've had in the past have been memory bound. I didn't have enough memory. That's why when I got my new system 3 years ago, or is it four?, I got 32 MB of memory. I think this game is taking as much as six megabytes. I'll play it tomorrow morning and post back here and let you know.

Finally it's not just the game it's other things I'm running at the same time I'm playing the game. They all use memory too. It doesn't hurt to have more memory than you need. it only hurts when you don't have enough.

And I haven't priced memory lately, back when I bought it memory was cheap compared to everything else but that may have changed.

The biggest single change I made that affected the overall performance is an SSD. I have an HDD that I use for backup. Everything runs off the SSD.

 
Doomofman said:
9700K currently, though upgrading to a 12700k soon.
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Honestly for the miniscule amount of improvement spending a ton of money on that will get you, you're better off just overclocking a little bit. Dropping $600-700 in for a mere 25% gain just doesn't add up in the long run. Switching to "Team Red" wouldn't give you much benefit either.

The only real plus to that upgrade is the hybrid architecture, which currently might cause more headaches than it saves.

 
ElCabong said:
Games nowadays depend more on the GPU than the CPU. upgrading your CPU may not do you much good.
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Not 7 days. It´s heavily CPU bound. Even on ultra settings my GPU is basically never above 85% usage at 60 FPS 1920x1080. 

@Doomofman It would be actually quite importnant to know what resolution you are using and what GPU also. If you play WQHD (1440p) or 4K the CPU won´t do that much even in a CPU heavy game like 7 days. Sure a 3090 can still easily be bottlenecked by the CPU, but i am just assumming here that you aren´t one of the few actually using one.

Upgrading to a 12700K is a bit expensive for the performance you get. Sure noticable, but @SylenThunder is right. Not worth it imo. In your case i would wait until AMD and Intel both released their next generation.

If you really really badly wanna upgrade right now, than at least go balls to the wall and go for the AMD R7 5800X3D wich is the currently best gaming CPU. Still not worth it imo considering you need a new motherboard also (even worse with Intel where you need  a new mother board and DDR 5 RAM also). I am gonna do that, but i can simply upgrade the CPU only, coming from a R5 3600 so my performance will go up about 40% getting the R7 5800X3D wich is imo a good deal considering i don´t need a new board and RAM. 

 
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   Using an old xeon system for past 3 years and never had cpu problems, best upgrades have been gpu, ram and ssd. Biggest outlay was 6gb gpu which turned out to be a great investment.

 
pApA^LeGBa said:
That´s the overall load on all cores/threads. You are CPU bound if one core is at 100% and 7 other cores and the 8 logical threads are at 0%. Overall usage is still pretty low but your still limited by the CPU. Most games do rely on single core performance. That´s a bit simplified though, other cores are usually used also, but one core is doing most of the work.
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Me with i7-8750H in my McBookPro have 4 cores loaded 100% most of the time... Even having the minimal possible graphics settings. On BM it is always 100%

 
@Vampirenostra Does it have a dedicated GPU? If not that might be the reason.

On a PC you need benchmarks like Prime95 or Cinebench to get all cores loaded at 100%. If a game does that, something is very wrong with the system. I have no clue about apple though.

 
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pApA^LeGBa said:
@Vampirenostra Does it have a dedicated GPU? If not that might be the reason.

On a PC you need benchmarks like Prime95 or Cinebench to get all cores loaded at 100%. If a game does that, something is very wrong with the system. I have no clue about apple though.
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The i7-8750H is 6 cores tho so it's not all cores loaded at 100%.

 
The question I want to ask you is;

why do you think you NEED to upgrade for better performance when your GPU is at 50%?

if you are bound by GPU memory constraints and you aren't able to shuffle textures fast enough I can see that limiting performance, however if you have more than 8GB of GPU ram and 16GB of fast DDR4 memory, I think you are wasting your money.

 
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