Gamer and programmer here! From the perspective of a gamer with a "large but not infinite budget" in the past say ~8 years. I play counterstrike where any fps stutter is unexceptable. I also enjoy prettier games like BF5, etc. My current system is an i7 8700k, 32GB ram (just because), and a 1080ti.
Intel has always been the go-to. The #1 Priority is thread performance, first and foremost. Second is at least 4 cores. Most modern games can utilize at least 4, but it's also important to give the OS and other programs like discord plenty of cores.
While the Ryzen Gen 1 and Gen 2 have been amazing values, for gaming performance Intel has still ben king. When you compare AMD to Intel FPS to FPS Intel nearly ALWAYS wins.
CSGO is especially thread performance reliant, but this goes for most games. It's worth noting too that while games can use multiple cores, I don't believe most engines scale to 8+ cores very well.
Historically the only reason Intel has won on absolute top performance gaming FPS is because their raw single-threaded performance has beaten AMD due to most games still being bad / ineffective with multiple threads. For the first time in many processor generations this may actually not be true because of Intel’s stumble in their 10 nm transition.
That changed slightly with Ryzen: AMD closed the gap on single-threaded IPC (close enough, anyway) but the new issue with Zen 1 and Zen+ was memory/cache/inter-CCX latencies. Zen+ solved most of the memory latency issues but hadn't fixed cache/CCX latencies much.
Supposedly Zen 2 solved most of that. (And some game benchmarks like CSGO suggest they really did) We'll see how it actually pans out since there's still the issue of inter-CCX latency (and now even cross-chiplet latency).
It doesn't solve all of it however. If your program has more than "$number_of_cores / 2" threads, you'll cross the CCX boundary at some point(s). On Zen 2, that instead changes to "$number_of_cores / 4" (CCX boundary) or "$number_of_cores / 2" (chiplet boundary).
Inter-CCX communication requires hopping over the Infinity Fabric bus, which (in case of Zen 1, no newer benchmarks) increases thread latency from ~45us to ~131us. I'm sure it was reduced in Zen+ and is probably closer to 100us by now. However, I'm not sure if inter-chiplet communication will be the same (e.g.: has its own IF bus) or worse (IO chip overhead).
Hopefully someone runs the same inter-thread communication benchmarks on Zen 2.
Recovering CSGO player here. I got a beefy box (TR1950X, dual 1070i’s, NVME, etc) for ML and crypto mining, and gaming inevitably followed. That plus low ping internet immediately boosted my ELO rankings and I started having more fun. Life in general became less fun since my sleep was suffering. That and the toxic CSGO community has kept me away, but I still relish the palpable advantage I enjoyed with better gear.
The trick is to play random matches and gradually add people you enjoy playing with. We started doing this a year ago, and now we have a small discord server with a few dozen people who are all fun to play with. It's best to recognize things are frustrating by not verbalize it 24/7 as it lowers the teams moral.
as another CSGO player, I am seriously considering one of the high end ryzen 3000 cpus. if the performance is as advertised, it looks like amd will be the single thread king for at least 6 months.
Before you pull the trigger wait to see what the latency between the chiplets/memory does to framerates. We'll know once benchmarks are out, but remember not just to look at average framerate but minimums too, you can have high framerate with terrible stuttering.
Intel has always been the go-to. The #1 Priority is thread performance, first and foremost. Second is at least 4 cores. Most modern games can utilize at least 4, but it's also important to give the OS and other programs like discord plenty of cores.
While the Ryzen Gen 1 and Gen 2 have been amazing values, for gaming performance Intel has still ben king. When you compare AMD to Intel FPS to FPS Intel nearly ALWAYS wins.
CSGO is especially thread performance reliant, but this goes for most games. It's worth noting too that while games can use multiple cores, I don't believe most engines scale to 8+ cores very well.