A19 RTX 3090 Benchmarks

[Naz]

I'm a bit late with them but even after ordering within 15 minutes on launch day in September, i didn't manage to get my hands on one until the end of December XD. This time we're just taking a look at the system "Trident" going from a GTX 1080ti to RTX 3090. Instead of reposting and making things even more confusing i won't be adding the previous benchmarks to this post, instead i can just link them.

 

Note on previous Benchmarks

Something to note on the previous benchmarks is that i made a small error with the formulas for the positive % increases. It's a cumulative error  (had part of the formula backwards :P) so any differences that were positive under 10% are more or less accurate. However with larger increases it get increasingly incorrect to the point a 50% increase is actually 100%. Below 10% it's only off by 0-2%. So as penance for my blunder i'm going to go back and correct the previous ones. All the benchmark % numbers here are correct to my knowledge though. I'll update in brackets when i've finished correcting them (Now fixed)

 

My Other 7DTD Benchmarks

 

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Alpha 20
A20.0 2 systems benchmarks
Alpha 19

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A19.3>A19.4>A19.5 Hotbox Benchmarks

Resizable Bar Trident Benchmarks

A19 RTX 3090 Trident Benchmarks

A19.2 B3 Hotbox Benchmarks

A19.0 Benchmarks 2 Systems Intel,AMD,SLI,Core Count And SMT Tested

A15 Trident Benchmarks 

 

Benchmark Notes & Disclaimers

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1. These figures should be taken as ball park figures and not absolute values.
7DTD is a very difficult game to benchmark accurately. It's in alpha and sometimes does weird things. Also some things are difficult to account for such as the AI, they will behave differently and spawn differently every run, which leads to #2.

2. What's controlled for and what's not
I haven't controlled for driver versions & windows versions. My goal was just to get "close enough" results instead of 100% accurate as possible. That said i have controlled for memory leaks, restarting the game after every run. Time of day is reset from the console after every run. When changing resolution i changed ingame before shutting down then validated with the unity screen selector on next launch. Background programs were running for the tests but assigned to cores not used by 7DTD. No zombies/animals where killed so areas weren't "cleared" until x amount of days, to insure that on following runs they would respawn (Although i can't do much if zombies kill animals or vise versa etc). I only did 1 pass on each test, however any result that didn't look right or didn't make sense was discarded and retested.

 

3. 1 system isn't enough to draw definitive conclusions for every configuration. The conclusions found here may or may not apply to your own systems, these results are only really comparable if you have similar hardware. But they will however give an idea of where the current performance is at with the hardware that was tested.

 

4. It's Alpha

Any update could change any conclusions drawn from these tests. Also as a work in progress things are always improving and getting worse, by the time 7DTD goes gold these results with be obsolete and invalid. Things are always changing in alpha.

 

5. Console Options used
all tests are run with increased view distance (sg optionsgfxviewdistance 12). 

6. Tests on different resolutions were done on monitors native aspect ratio
16:9 Resolutions were tested on an Asus PB287Q 4K 3840x2160 60HZ Monitor
21:9 Resolution was tested on an LG 38GL950G 3840x1600 175Hz Monitor

 

7. The benchmark Run
I've been using the same run since A14 for all tests, you can find more details on the exact run in my a15 benchmarks i did ages ago Here

 

 

 

System Tested

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Trident
 

CPU	AMD R9 3950x
Motherboard	Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme
Ram	G.SKILL Trident Z Neo 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR4 3600Mhz CL16-19-19-39
Storage 1 Save Data	1TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
Storage 2 Game Data	2TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe PCIe 4 M.2 SSD
GPU	MSI Suprim X RTX 3090 24GB

 

 

System Overclock Notes

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[All Core] CPU: Vcore: 1.3V CCD 0: CCX 0&1: 41.75 CCD 1: CCX 0&1: 40.75  Ram: Stock: Default JEDEC(2133Mhz) , Overclock: XMP Enabled (3600Mhz)   GPU Core:+160 Mem:+550        GPU Bios Flashed with a 500 Watt Power Target

[Gaming Profile V1] CPU: Vcore: 1.45V CCD 0: CCX 0: 45.50  CCD 0: CCX 1: 44.50  CCD1 DISABLED SMT: Disabled Down Core Control: Six + Six Ram: Stock: Default JEDEC(2133Mhz) , Overclock: XMP Enabled (3600Mhz)     GPU Core:+160 Mem:+550       GPU Bios Flashed with a 500 Watt Power Target

[Gaming Profile V2] CPU: Vcore: 1.45V CCD 0: CCX 0: 45.50  CCD 0: CCX 1: 44.50  CCD1 DISABLED SMT: Disabled Ram: Stock: Default JEDEC(2133Mhz) , Overclock: XMP Enabled (3600Mhz)     GPU Core:+160 Mem:+550       GPU Bios Flashed with a 500 Watt Power Target

 

 

Tested With 2 Video Settings

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"Ultra Settings 1"

"Ultra Settings 2"

"Lower Settings 1"

"Lower Settings 2"

 

 

Trident Benchmarks

I have a new config this time around "Gaming Profile V2" This profile is identical to the V1 profile config with the exception of the 2 disabled cores. This is so i can launch 7DTD with a shortcut that assigns 4 cores in the first CCX and all background apps are assigned to the other CCX. It's also launched with high cpu priority so if any other task are running on those 4 threads 7DTD will be given priority. This also means it skips the unity screen selector so i have to rely on double checking the options menu after every launch and looking out for signs it's actually in the resolution i set.

I've also added 2 new metrics to the tables, average gpu clock and average gpu utilisation. These let us see when there is a severe cpu bottleneck and the cards clocks throttle because there isn't enough of a gpu load to justify a higher performance state. We can also see how much of the cards performance is able to be used and how much is left as "potential performance" 

A19.0 B180 Ultra Settings
 

I can no longer upload the original Excel files here, so if you want to see the original files i'll have them zipped Here

 

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A19.0 B180 Lower Settings

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Conclusions
So there we have it, the 3090 is indeed a powerful card but in a cpu bound game don't expect to be getting every penny's worth out of it. The highest gpu utilisation we could manage here was 92%. This was at 4k with the gpu, ram and cpu all overclocked + assigning 4 cores to 7dtd with high cpu priority and having any background programs assigned cores on the other CCX. The cpu overclock was also only possible to achieve with half the cores disables and virtual threads disables (HT/SMT).

So with all the tricks in the book we can get close to maxing out the card but not quite, it may be possible with the newer ryzen 5000 cpus, but i wouldn't expect it would max out the gpu at anything other than 4k.

If you've made it all the way through this congrats, as a reward i've premade a pair of shortcuts that assign 7dtd 4 true cores and give it high cpu priority, which you can grab Here
assigning 7dtd 4 true cores in this example improved performance by 80-100% but how much it will improve will might differ depending on your cpu.
Note you will still need to have steam open for these to work and they won't work with every cpu. It should work with cpus with 4 cores and 8 threads minimum and only with cpus that have hyperthreading or smt (virtual threads) If you have a cpu with 6 cores 6 threads for example you'll need to create your own shortcut or if you just prefer to do it yourself there is a good guide Here. One shortcut is just 7DTD without EAC and one is for launching 7DTD with EAC. One final note is this will only improve performance if you're cpu bound, if you're rocking a gt 710 trying to play at 4k this won't help. These shortcuts also assume 7DTD is installed in it's default location
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\7 Days To Die
If you have it installed somewhere else , you'll need to edit them to point to the correct location.