A Look At Linux Gaming Performance Scaling On The Threadripper 2950X

In A Total War Saga: THRONES OF BRITANNIA, Feral's latest Vulkan Linux game port, at 1080p low quality settings the scaling peaked at about four threads.

Or with higher quality visuals at 1080p, the GTX 1080 Ti didn't get any faster past four threads while the RX Vega 64 peaked at two CPU threads on the Threadripper 2950X.

Unigine Superposition didn't see much scaling with the increasing thread counts even at 1080p low quality settings.

The X-Plane 11 flight simulator also barely scaled to any higher frame-rates past two cores.

There are a lot of real-world Linux workloads that can benefit from 16 cores / 32 threads on the Threadripper 2950X (or even 32 cores / 64 threads with the Threadripper 2990WX), but Linux gaming isn't close to being one of them. Even on Windows, game developers are still adapting to 16 threads becoming more common and the latest Steam Survey results across platforms still indicate four CPU cores is most common at 56% of those gamers while some 34% still have just two physical CPU cores. It really won't be until the next generation of games where we can hopefully see much better scaling out of those games and then to cross our fingers that those Linux game ports and their threading capabilities don't get held up by the various porting layers employed by the various companies. Or to hope that Wine doesn't become a threading bottleneck for running Windows games on Linux. Granted, the more cores/threads of CPUs like the Threadripper 2950X can pay off if you plan on having lots of background tasks running on the system, especially if doing any game streaming/recording and similar processes.

If you didn't see my earlier results, see the Threadripper 2990WX Linux benchmarks for seeing where having more CPU cores/threads can really pay off.