Yes, many games utilize AVX for improved performance.
Yes, many games utilize AVX for improved performance.
I placed a wager with a friend on my CPU performance. I tested my overclock using AIDA64 for two to three hours, and my system has stayed very reliable for gaming, rendering, and decompression without any blue screens for three years. When he asked me to run P95 with AVX, my PC crashed after just five minutes. Clearly, my current overclock isn’t suited for AVX tasks, but how often do these issues occur?
Many games don’t need AVX, though a few do. A recent case that stands out is Resident Evil Village. The issue seems to stem from AVX’s performance demands. You might be able to lower your CPU speed in the BIOS settings to handle it better, but I’m not entirely sure. I’ve seen this happen before.
There are options like AVX and Prime95 available. Prime95 really challenges performance on FP64, especially under heavy workloads. Similar specialized applications such as Linpack are the closest alternatives. For everyday user tasks involving AVX, you should be fine. I’m not sure what Aida does currently, but if you enable the "FPU" stress test it might perform well in that area. Cinebench R20 and later support AVX but not as intensely as Prime95. Y-cruncher differs significantly from Prime95 yet also gains from advanced AVX configurations. Ultimately, this kind of overclocking is becoming more viable due to targeted instability. If you rarely use Prime95, its lack of stability shouldn’t cause issues unless you encounter other problems.
AVX will generate more heat, which is why offsets were added to allow higher clock speeds despite limited cooling. When AVX activates it initiates the offset and quickly reduces performance. This means you might drop from 5GHz to around 4.7 or lower depending on your original setting. AVX is quite demanding.
I'm ready to start with RE8. Just let me know if anything goes wrong. For your Z68, the AVX offset isn't supported.
It doesn't appear to be supported on my Z77 board either. Those Z87 and higher models really struggled without some kind of workaround.
They also bypass overclocking by disconnecting the ring bus from the core!
I’m not entirely confident without checking again, but I believe the AVX offset was added around Kaby Lake and wasn’t present in Skylake. This change is more related to Intel’s design. Ryzen handles it differently by applying various limits, causing it to slow down during heavy AVX tasks. This means you’ll get better performance within a fixed power budget.