For a long time only the most expensive of PCs sported more than four cores, but AMD changed that in 2017 with the launch of its Ryzen CPUs, which introduced six-cores to the mainstream and eight-cores at the top-end. It wasn't quite ready to beat Intel at gaming, but AMD had changed the paradigm that had existed for more than a decade and now, two years and two-generations of CPUs later, game developers are starting to take advantage of those additional cores.
Wolfenstein: Youngblood is one of the hottest new games built on the Vulkan API using the new id Tech 6 engine. It's as modern as games get and it shows that if you're building a gaming PC, six cores should be your minimum.
WCCFTech put the game and various hardware configurations through their paces in some extensive testing, and came up with some interesting results.
Although the test was only conducted with a 9900K, the core and threat count tests are far more interesting to us than the typical GPU scaling we see throughout the product stack.
At two cores with two threads, the game doesn't even function, but two cores and four threads comes out strong with average FPS over 200. But that's just the beginning. We then see an increase to as much as 285 FPS when using four cores and eight threats, with a massive increase in one percent and 0.1 percent lows with eighth-threads enabled.
Six cores and 12 threads are a pretty solid sweet spot, with great average, low, and ultra-low FPS results. The eight-core, 16-thread version still pulls slightly ahead though, suggesting that games in the future should have no problem utilizing the additional cores and threads of super high-end chips like AMD's Ryzen 3900X, with its 12 cores and 24 threads.
