AMD Threadripper 2950X versus i9 line?

[Kayley]

Some of you are really going a bit overboard with computing power here.

I run 30 WoW clients on 4 cores (8HT) - i7-5960x - and I play my main on settings 10, everything on, 3440x1440p with the remaining 4 cores WHILE goofing around on twitch/youtube/movies. When I played 12 accounts the CPU would throttle itself because it wasn't being utilized enough lol. Now a single 980ti for the slaves (34% utlization in world pvp- big groups). A single 980ti for the 'main' .. 80fps in Uldir, pretty constant.. roughly 45fps in Boralus (tanks hard here for some reason). Yes my PC parts are overclocked and yeah they are ollldddd

i9-7900X is roughly 5-8 frames slower than the 5960x, but it has 2 extra cores sitting around doing nothing.
1920x is roughly 8-12 frames slower than the 5960x, but has 4 extra cores sitting around doing nothing.
2990WX was roughly 35 frames slower than the 5960x. It was shit for gaming, so gosh darn amazing with everything else. Turns out this was caused by the GPUs and nvidia have released a patch which corrects it in quite a few gaming titles-- haven't tested it myself but did the old google and it seems legit. I've only tested the above hardware.

Certain games will run better on certain hardware; that part wont change. No matter what you buy for multiboxing you will not even come close to maxing it unless you run an INSANE amount of clients.

[EaTCarbS]

Certain games will run better on certain hardware; that part wont change. No matter what you buy for multiboxing you will not even come close to maxing it unless you run an INSANE amount of clients.

Pretty much this. I'm still using a i7 930 (overclocked) for multiboxing and have 0 issues.

[MiRai]

I run 30 WoW clients on 4 cores (8HT) - i7-5960x -and I play my main on settings 10, everything on, 3440x1440p with the remaining 4 cores WHILE goofing around on twitch/youtube/movies.

Now a single 980ti for the slaves (34% utlization in world pvp- big groups). A single 980ti for the 'main' .. 80fps in Uldir, pretty constant.. roughly 45fps in Boralus (tanks hard here for some reason).

Just to be clear, you run 30 (thirty) game clients, all rendering at 3440x1440, and they're all crammed onto 8 threads? That's almost 149 million pixels to render. However, you don't mention the framerates you're using.

To put things into perspective, I run five game clients at 3840x1630, which is about 31 million pixels, and while my 10C/20T CPU is fine (although much higher load than you're reporting), my 1080 Ti is easily pushing beyond 50% when I'm in BFA zones. To add to that, none of my game clients are using anywhere near a 10 preset for in-game video settings, and I'm running 60/25 fore/background framerates.

To provide an additional example case, MadMilitia, who plays at about the same resolution you do and has very similar hardware, was having a difficult time running 8 game clients back in Legion (with only one of his characters at 7 on the in-game settings slider).

I also went ahead and matched your core/thread settings with my setup, and below is the result of five game clients using the same settings up above, but in Silvermoon City, which has old textures and doesn't produce the same amount of load as MoP/WoD/Legion/BFA do.

https://i.imgur.com/wNgZ140.png

So, you can see that something might not be adding up here. I'm going to say that either I'm missing something, or you're, perhaps, misunderstanding how your setup is configured/rendering, and if you're using ISBoxer, then perhaps you should share your profile so that we can at least verify what your setup is doing.

Certain games will run better on certain hardware; that part wont change. No matter what you buy for multiboxing you will not even come close to maxing it unless you run an INSANE amount of clients.

Pretty much this. I'm still using a i7 930 (overclocked) for multiboxing and have 0 issues.

As stated above, we're missing a ton of details. Game? How many game clients? Resolution? In-game settings? Foreground/Background framerates? All of this is necessary information when telling others how your hardware performs.

Personally, I have my doubts that I'd be able to run my multiboxing setup on only an i7 930 system from almost 9 years ago. I have an old 2600K system that I fired up in Warlords of Draenor to see how it'd perform (single game client), and if I'm remembering correctly, I was both both CPU and GPU limited, and I was barely capable of pushing max settings at 2560x1080 @ 60 FPS.

[Kayley]

I forgot how to get ingame readings like what you posted MiRai. The main is in Boralus and my alts are in Dalaran--- beating on a turnip. I found that while dpsing it puts a realistic stress on the CPU/GPU to give a more accurate reading.

I lowered my CPU OC to 4.4ghz to match your cpu better. I removed the GPU's OC entirely.
Renderscale 100%. Slaves set to 1. DX11. Physics Interaction Player only. Main settings 10, 3440x1440p. Here
*edit* Slaves are 20fps background and the foreground is 144fps *edit* 30 'slaves' and my main. So 31.

I then thought maybe it's some weird 21:9 vs 16:9 bug. So I messed with the renderscale and had it output @ 5120x2880 (renderscale 200% - 2560x1440, XB270HU- old monitor) . Had my girls fighting a turnip in dalaran, took my main into LFR. 45-55fps consistent. I then had my friends pull all the trash and unload AOE style~ that caused my poor little 980ti to be overwhelmed; stuttered and dropped frames (20fps). Here

Notice how under normal WoW gameplay (first picture) my GPU doesn't really even come out of powersaving. Goes up 30w. When I changed the resolution to 5120x2880 it went to 250w.

FWIW a friend is playing 20 on a 3570k. Although he has optimised his setups to allow it to work out ok. (renderscale 0.1 on alts etc etc).

*second edit*
Due to RAM being so overpriced I just bought a extra SSD and use it as a dedicated storage for Pagefile.sys.
Frees up physical RAM and the performance hit is really negligable. Maybe that helps too? I don't know.

*third edit*
I had a look at MadMilitia's setup as you mentioned.. the 1080 gtx is better than my 980ti's for sure, but the CPU is very different. 8mb cache vs 20mb. 16 pcie lanes vs 40. The Memory bandwidth is half- 34gb/s vs 64gb/s. I'd expect it to struggle a little bit-- but not as much as it was.

[EaTCarbS]

As stated above, we're missing a ton of details. Game? How many game clients? Resolution? In-game settings? Foreground/Background framerates? All of this is necessary information when telling others how your hardware performs.

Personally, I have my doubts that I'd be able to run my multiboxing setup on only an i7 930 system from almost 9 years ago. I have an old 2600K system that I fired up in Warlords of Draenor to see how it'd perform (single game client), and if I'm remembering correctly, I was both both CPU and GPU limited, and I was barely capable of pushing max settings at 2560x1080 @ 60 FPS.

I do mainly EVE Online these days, but recently dipped back into wow to try it out. I'm certainly not running everything at a buttery smooth 60fps constantly but it is certainly playable. I have 5 wow accounts all running with default graphics (7) @ 1080p, with background limited to 30, and the main client averages around 40fps. CPU utilization hovers around 50%. This is on an i7 930 oc'd to 4.22ghz and a gtx 1070.

In EVE I do 20 clients but you more or less need 0 graphics on your alts, so setting them to absolute minimum settings is common.

[MiRai]

I forgot how to get ingame readings like what you posted MiRai. The main is in Boralus and my alts are in Dalaran--- beating on a turnip. I found that while dpsing it puts a realistic stress on the CPU/GPU to give a more accurate reading.

I lowered my CPU OC to 4.4ghz to match your cpu better. I removed the GPU's OC entirely.
Renderscale 100%. Slaves set to 1. DX11. Physics Interaction Player only. Main settings 10, 3440x1440p. Here
*edit* Slaves are 20fps background and the foreground is 144fps *edit* 30 'slaves' and my main. So 31.

I then thought maybe it's some weird 21:9 vs 16:9 bug. So I messed with the renderscale and had it output @ 5120x2880 (renderscale 200% - 2560x1440, XB270HU- old monitor) . Had my girls fighting a turnip in dalaran, took my main into LFR. 45-55fps consistent. I then had my friends pull all the trash and unload AOE style~ that caused my poor little 980ti to be overwhelmed; stuttered and dropped frames (20fps). Here

Notice how under normal WoW gameplay (first picture) my GPU doesn't really even come out of powersaving. Goes up 30w. When I changed the resolution to 5120x2880 it went to 250w.

FWIW a friend is playing 20 on a 3570k. Although he has optimised his setups to allow it to work out ok. (renderscale 0.1 on alts etc etc).

Some things to note...

• Your first screenshot shows all cores being worked, when you said you were only using four out of eight. This isn't a big deal since your overall load isn't much different than what you originally said, but I just wanted to point that out.
• Are you changing focus before taking screenshots? The reason I ask is because the moment you pull focus away from the game clients they usually fall back to their background framerate, which can greatly reduce load.
• The first screenshot shows you only using 1.8GB of VRAM. When I log in a solo character and use a render scale of 2986x1680 that almost matches the pixel count of 3440x1440, I eat up almost 1.3GB at an in-game slider setting of 7 (no AA). You're running 29 more game clients and you're only eating up 500MB more than my one game client.
• You're pumping out 724 frames across 30 game clients (29 x 20 + 144) and your GPU load is only ~30%. Using the same in-game settings from my previous bullet, I barely achieve 320 FPS and I'm zoomed into first-person while staring at the ground with my UI disabled, and my 1080 Ti is pegged at 100% load at this point. If I try to play normally (still solo), my FPS bounces around between 120 and 190.

Do you see how things aren't adding up... at all? Ultimately, what I would like to know is whether or not you're using ISBoxer. This is a huge missing detail that may reveal why you're able to do what you can do. If you are using ISBoxer, then I'm going to, once again, ask to see your profile, and if you aren't, then I'm going to ask that you post the bit of your script that has your layout in it, since you're obviously doing something much different with your setup, that the vast majority of multiboxers aren't.

*second edit*
Due to RAM being so overpriced I just bought a extra SSD and use it as a dedicated storage for Pagefile.sys.
Frees up physical RAM and the performance hit is really negligable. Maybe that helps too? I don't know.

It wouldn't make any difference in loads being produced on the CPU and GPU while standing still. Not only that, but a PageFile is unlikely to be used when you still have RAM available, which, according to your screenshots, you do.

*third edit*
I had a look at MadMilitia's setup as you mentioned.. the 1080 gtx is better than my 980ti's for sure, but the CPU is very different. 8mb cache vs 20mb. 16 pcie lanes vs 40. The Memory bandwidth is half- 34gb/s vs 64gb/s. I'd expect it to struggle a little bit-- but not as much as it was.

Both chipsets have PCIe 3.0, and any piece of hardware can only have access to 16 lanes at any given time. Just because you have access to more lanes, overall, doesn't mean his GPU will be bottlenecked—your GPU is plugged into an x16 slot, and his GPU is plugged into an x16 slot.

If there was any difference, it would be between 8x and 16x, and even then, the difference between those, for the past several generations of GPUs, and has been shown to be negligible (plenty of reviews out there on this topic). Also, the cache is not going to be the deciding factor between 30 games clients and 8 game clients.

----------

I do mainly EVE Online these days, but recently dipped back into wow to try it out. I'm certainly not running everything at a buttery smooth 60fps constantly but it is certainly playable. I have 5 wow accounts all running with default graphics (7) @ 1080p, with background limited to 30, and the main client averages around 40fps. CPU utilization hovers around 50%. This is on an i7 930 oc'd to 4.22ghz and a gtx 1070.

In EVE I do 20 clients but you more or less need 0 graphics on your alts, so setting them to absolute minimum settings is common.

There we go, more details!

What I take issue with is that, in your previous post you said you had zero issues, but, for me, not being able to maintain 60 FPS (when using a 60 Hz panel) would most definitely be an issue. You may not find that to be an issue, but I guarantee that someone else will, and by throwing a blanket statement of "I have zero issues" when referring to only a 9-year old CPU can easily give people this false sense of what they need to buy—not to mention you also have a 1070, which is not a 9-year old GPU.

Now, to be fair, the OP doesn't mention how many clients they'll be playing, nor what resolution they'll be running at, so we don't have that to go off of, but I do have two final questions:

1) What zone(s) are you in where you're seeing the performance you report?
2) Why not just drop the slaves down to 20 FPS to achieve that buttery smooth 60 FPS on the main?

[WOWBOX40]

Could we get a complete spec sheet of that pc with cpu of 4 cores 8 threads that is able to run 30 instances of wow please. And a video taken externaly to showcase it in action, while riding around new dalaran, attacking target dummies and whatnot. That would be aaaawesome. Oh and remember to add a overlay that shows the current usage of cpu, ram and vram, and temps. Oh and the fps. Ty.

[Kayley]

Hiya

I actually agree in that some things don't add up. So I backed up my config, deleted WoW, reinstalled and did the same tests (stricter).

Sorry Mirai I thought I made it clear (I failed) that I had my main running along with the 'slaves' (not this time). I tried my best to close down any other programs that might intefere with the testing. 30 accounts running, 20fps background, settings 1, triple buffering disabled, reduce input lag disabled, msaa none, multisample alpha Enabled, Post-process AA none, resample quality none, Graphics API DX11, physics interaction player only, UI scale on max. Here I let it 'record' via hwinfo for 7 mins so you can get the idea of the averages etc. CPU0 is being used by windows to manage everything I assume. No WoW processes are attached to it.

This is my Main, I changed the resolution to 2986x1680 to match yours. Settings are 10, everything enabled except Vertical Sync. Here
I said I would chug down to 45-55fps in boralus usually, same time of day, same crowded area... yet after the reinstall I have 79-85 fps and my 980ti is being utilized more. I can only assume I had changed a config file in the past and forgotten about it. Double and triple checked everything was on the highest ingame setting.

It's monday and I'm at work etc now, but the coming weekend I can do what wowbox40 suggested and film it externally with the usage monitors up. Until then I dunno.

*pagefile*
haha, before when I let windows assign the pagefile size my PC would eventually BSOD due to lack of Memory with 21 accounts + me on my main. I dedicated a SSD to it (pagefile) and now I run 30 accounts with my main + a stupid amount of random crap and it says I have 10gb RAM spare. It's insane.

*second edit*
We have two data entries Mirai. Yours and mine. Is there any standardised benchmarking tools we can use to simulate this mboxing load?

*third editzzzzzzz*
Can I please have a HWinfo report like the one I gave so I can see what your power draw, VRAM usage (etc) is like too? Just 5 mins standing around a crowded boralus (if alliance) or you wailing on a turnip in dalaran. tyty.

You helped build this pc years ago and I really don't mind you remote logging in to poke around at some point.
My ISBOXER profile is basic-- I literally just set the cpu wizard to no strategy then assigned the 'slaves' the bottom half of the CPU and the main the top half.

[MiRai]

We have two data entries Mirai. Yours and mine.

We have plenty of data from over the years since BFA didn't increase the hardware requirements all that much more than what was needed in Legion. Throughout that time, myself and others have helped numerous people build computers for multiboxing—both new multiboxers and already established multiboxers who began to realize that their current machine could no longer perform up to their expectations—and if someone came to me and told me they wanted to run 30 game clients (you originally wanted to run 10), I would never recommend that they attempt to do so on a single machine with modern day hardware.

You helped build this pc years ago and I really don't mind you remote logging in to poke around at some point.

I don't want to remote log in, I want you to share your ISBoxer profile.

My ISBOXER profile is basic-- I literally just set the cpu wizard to no strategy then assigned the 'slaves' the bottom half of the CPU and the main the top half.

Then why not just share it? I've asked two times now for you to share your profile, but for some reason, you aren't (or won't).

[Kicksome]

This is my personal experience, yours may vary....
I have that same processor, same video card - great processor (although I retired it a couple years ago, so it's sitting around somewhere). I was able to run max 12x or 13x wow instances (13th just sat minimized). I had another machine next to it that ran 12 or 13x instances. For a total of 25/26 (The 26th acct was for phasing purposes - so it was just doing nothing). But I had to split them between the two machines. (Very cool innerspace/isboxer can do that!)

I tried running more than 12x actively and it s... the bed. on that machine. So I had to buy another machine. And I ran at like a 3 graphic level. 45 max frame rate, 12 on slaves in background.

Even with my i9-7980XE 18/36 core,, overclocked to ~4.2ghz, 64 gigs ram, with raid 0 NVMe drives. 1080ti's etc... it's really not possible to run more than 26 instances with Isboxer USING the built in FTL - you run out of the 6 key combos that make it possible - an issue I ran into. Maybe you could open more instances and use some other method to do FTL that would work? No clue.

With 10 characters, using graphics level 3 on my i9-7980xe (18/36 core), with a 1080ti using only a single 3440x1440 Ultrawide, I get about 45 FPS in town. Note the ~52 fps doing nothing - with no one around, and that's a 1080 ti card - at 3 graphic level. 60 foreground/15 background.
Although the main window is big. I will say it's still silky smooth, just not capped FPS wise - with 10 instances of wow at graphic level 3.