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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3884 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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If your main goal is Rimworld performance, AMD's 5800x3D CPU is going to be the best value you can buy (or the 7800x3D when it comes out next year) because its huge cache makes a big difference (up to 40%) for complex sim games with lots of entities.

I've been drooling over these for Factorio, but similar sort of position where I can't justify it for the ~2hrs a week I spend using the PC that way.

CPU sim games are such an upgrade trap: "yesss, now I can simulate seven million pieces of iron moving down a belt! Progress!"

The widely-touted Factorio benchmarks run at well over 200+ UPS. The outsized gains from the big cache don't hold up as well with larger factories that struggle to maintain 60, presumably because they overflow it. Something that does help Factorio run faster on pretty much any computer is forcing it to use a larger page size with mimalloc.

Even in that case it's going toe to toe against a CPU twice its price with vastly higher single core speed, which is pretty amazing!

Thanks for the tip. If my business programs were available on Linux I'd switch over entirely at this point.

Interesting. Never thought about the cache mattering. Thanks for the tip.

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