I know people meme about “Zen 5%” (sidenote: genuinely a clever quip), but most of that is down to AMD massively reducing the power draw of the chips.
If you set it to the same power limits as Zen4, you can get large performance improvements.
Gamers have been saying for years that stuff is getting too power-hungry, but when steps were made to reverse this, they collectively lost their minds.
Seriously, what are they expecting, a 25% improvement in performance at half the power draw, while staying on a 5nm-family node?
AMD were dumb for thinking gamers give even the slightest fuck about power usage. Gamers would much more readily accept a CPU going from 120W to 500W if it meant an imaginary +20% perf uplift over a CPU going from 120W to 70W with a +5% perf uplift. I say imaginary because nobody with a high end CPU and a 4090 actually plays their games at 1080p low.
There are gamers and there are gamers.
Some gamers prefer not to have the level of noise of a jet engine taking off right next to them to get a couple percent more frames per second on a game.
I would say there are at least two quite different markets amongst PC gamers who have different preferred balances between performance and the downsides of it (noise, heat, power costs), a bit like not all people who enjoy driving want muscle cars.
I couldn’t quite understand why people were memeing on Zen 5. It’s 5% performance increase while at much lower TDP, what is there not to like? Efficiency is plenty important. And even if we could see a 20% performance increase while using more power, is that worth it? What are the true benefits of a 20% faster CPU when considering pure gaming while we are already at the top of the spec sheet? The games where the difference would be a massive number of FPS are those like CS2 where you would go from 600 to 720 fps, does that truly matter? I like my pcs running as efficient as possible, that way I know they’ll last longer.
To them it probably is. I’ve seen literal posts ( or GitHub comments - I forgot ) where they are raging their fps dropped from 420 to 370 with the latest patch and that the game is now completely unplayable!
They have a point complaining because the patch had a big fps drop, but the game is unplayable? At 370fps? Gtfo xD.
There’s people playing on a lot less than that.
So the smart move here for AMD would have been to bin the chips differently according to their tested stability for power usage, like Intel T SKUs. It’s the same chip, but the “X” versions are running at full power (with bios options to turn it down to be more efficient, or aggressively scale power delivery, or what have you), and “E” versions that just always run at lower voltages and currents.
I agree that cutting TDP nearly in half while STILL pulling out a perf gain is remarkable, but also not something most gamers are going to care much about in the context of a desktop system.
