In this somewhat longer video, I am doing Syndicate missions in Warframe, with a friend who I made earlier. Remember the talking Pretzel? Anyway, the Nightwave challenge required us to do ten of these missions, so that's what we did.
The Ryzen 5 3400G performs well, but, obviously it is heavily bandwidth limited in hectic scenes in the game. I notice, that in many scenes the frame rate is below 60, sometimes in the mid 40s, and the GPU isn't at maximum utilisation. This indicates a CPU limitation, but the cores are operating close to 4 GHz in some of these situations. This, in my opinion, is likely due to a bandwidth limitation of the CPU cores. The relatively (for Integrated) powerful "Vega 11" graphics processor is happy to take up almost all of the ~38 GB/s offered by the dual-channel 2400 MHz DDR4 interface, leaving the CPU cores competing for bandwidth.
This is exacerbated by the relatively small L3 cache for the CPU, on the "Picasso" silicon. Which is only 4MB in size, for its single CCX. This is half the size of the "Summit Ridge" and "Pinnacle Ridge" CPU-only "Zeppelin dies; their two CCXs have 8MB each, for the four cores. Furthermore, the "Matisse" CPU chiplet employed by the newer 3rd generation "Zen2" CPUs, has a huge 16MB of L3 cache in each four core CCX.
What this means is, the CPU cores on the 3400G are having to go to main memory more often, due to the smaller L3 cache size, and as a result it increases the bandwidth contention with the GPU. Of course, it's never unplayable, and I want to test with faster RAM (Overclocked and MAYBE my 3200 MHz kit from my desktop) in the future, to see how much of a profound effect on performance, more bandwidth has.
But, uh, here's the video.
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