AMD must think current & future games will use "up to" 12 threads...
When I upgraded from 7600X to 9700X, my current fav game - Starfield chews up all 16 threads with exactly the same cpu usage in all threads on avg compared to the Zen 4 chip according to HWiNFO. More than likely though it's the creation 2 engine not being optimised very well for PC.
Yeah and did you actually get any different FPS out of all those utilized threads?
The answer is no. I know because we've analyzed this on TPU in the Starfield topic earlier. All that CPU 'load' in Starfield is just the result of a very messy engine. Its not even about PC optimization, its just the shitty state of Creation Engine overall, its a scrambled mess of code.
Even 8 thread is already more than sufficient, and even 'extremely fine'. I disabled SMT on my 7800X3D, and the only differences I saw were actually
gains in FPS. 8c/8t. There is not a single game I've played since that shows lower performance than running 8c16t.
Elsewhere you see games like Cyberpunk eat a lot of threads, but you will also notice none of them, or just one of them, is fully utilized. Most are pushing something around 30-60% usage per thread. The bottom line, is that even with better threaded games and better APIs there will still be one heavy sequential game thread that bogs everything down. Some games/game logic/engines just simply don't go further than a specific FPS number either, regardless of the CPU you throw at it.
CPU perf in gaming is highly stagnant and current day procs just destroy virtually everything in gaming with ease. The bigger bottlenecks appear elsewhere.