Huh ... interesting article. Apparently during gaming turning SMT off shows a better performance uplift on Zen 5 CPUs than compared to Zen 4.
www.techpowerup.com
Zen 4 gaming performance can occasionally be helped with SMT off too (in stark contrast to Cinebench R24 which shows nearly a 30% uplift with SMT on compared to off), but it's interesting that even in those cases, Zen 5 is often more extreme and show performance gains by turning SMT off even when Zen 4 doesn't.
That's another reason why it's fine not to add SMT if you don't have to - not every application benefits, particularly gaming which can even show regressions in performance. Sure it's great on Cinebench, but ... how realistic is that kind of workload for most people's personal computers? My sense of it is, those types of workloads are more rare than not for most people.
We found the Missing Performance: Zen 5 Tested with SMT Disabled
Reviews of AMD’s Zen 5 processors this week surprised many, with lower-than-expected results. After some investigation, we discovered that turning off Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) can yield notable performance gains, particularly in gaming. This article presents our findings, including...
Zen 4 gaming performance can occasionally be helped with SMT off too (in stark contrast to Cinebench R24 which shows nearly a 30% uplift with SMT on compared to off), but it's interesting that even in those cases, Zen 5 is often more extreme and show performance gains by turning SMT off even when Zen 4 doesn't.
That's another reason why it's fine not to add SMT if you don't have to - not every application benefits, particularly gaming which can even show regressions in performance. Sure it's great on Cinebench, but ... how realistic is that kind of workload for most people's personal computers? My sense of it is, those types of workloads are more rare than not for most people.
