Well I don't have an Opteron, but I do have a PhenomII X6 and so I would expect relatively similar-ish performance and experience on desktop gaming. Obviously some issues with games needing instructions that it doesn't support, but otherwise "ok" is the result for basically everything that I play. Anything single-threaded might suffer a little, so be wary of heavy OpenGL titles.

If you have the option, what makes more of a difference is as speedy RAM as you can find, and an SSD. They really gave me noticeable improvements over the years. I'm running an R9 380X, which is probably considered an older card now, but of all things what breathed new life into its usage is Vulkan. Total Warhammer gets a bit sluggish, but Total Warhammer II runs _much_ better, especially if I set CPU governor to performance mode (normally I keep it at ondemand).

I try run most games at 1080p, if it's suffering a lot I might drop it to 720p (actually I can't recall the last game I did that with). Some I might run with settings on full, others at medium. A little bit of tweaking to various settings basically - my aim is a steady framerate: normally I'm ok with 30fps, but actually most games run quite a bit better than that (45 or 60).

Oh, and while I don't have water cooling or anything fancy, I did spend the time to be sure the fan configuration was quite good, so I have zero issues with overheating. 4 case fans in total, nice silent ones, all done to draw air in through the front and then pass it out the back, top, and side. CPU fan never really needs to spin up high; good case airflow is key rather than raw fan power. I know that's all probably quite obvious, but I've seen a good many overlook it.

In summary, my own setup is a real workhorse, and I have no plans to upgrade anything right now. Used to, but it's been going so well that I've no plans to change anything. This is partially because in recent years I've noticed software quality improving, and the utilisation of the graphics card improving as well (i.e the GPU is shouldering a lot more of the burden, leaving the CPU free for other tasks).

--edit: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided I can't play the native version. wine+DXVK and the GOG version though, after some shader caching, runs just fine. Rise of the Tomb Raider is without issue (doesn't even stutter for me anywhere - and that's the Feral version of course). Shadow of the Tomb Raider I can't play on it (instruction set issue). Doom used to run fine when it ran, but some update broke it for me (now I play it through Stadia, don't judge!). Total Warhammer II is fine, 3 Kingdoms is fine, basically any of the Total War series with Vulkan run completely fine.

Last edited by mirv on 17 March 2022 at 10:32 am UTC

Quoting: mirvWell I don't have an Opteron, but I do have a PhenomII X6 and so I would expect relatively similar-ish performance and experience on desktop gaming. Obviously some issues with games needing instructions that it doesn't support, but otherwise "ok" is the result for basically everything that I play. Anything single-threaded might suffer a little, so be wary of heavy OpenGL titles.

If you have the option, what makes more of a difference is as speedy RAM as you can find, and an SSD. They really gave me noticeable improvements over the years. I'm running an R9 380X, which is probably considered an older card now, but of all things what breathed new life into its usage is Vulkan. Total Warhammer gets a bit sluggish, but Total Warhammer II runs _much_ better, especially if I set CPU governor to performance mode (normally I keep it at ondemand).

I try run most games at 1080p, if it's suffering a lot I might drop it to 720p (actually I can't recall the last game I did that with). Some I might run with settings on full, others at medium. A little bit of tweaking to various settings basically - my aim is a steady framerate: normally I'm ok with 30fps, but actually most games run quite a bit better than that (45 or 60).

Oh, and while I don't have water cooling or anything fancy, I did spend the time to be sure the fan configuration was quite good, so I have zero issues with overheating. 4 case fans in total, nice silent ones, all done to draw air in through the front and then pass it out the back, top, and side. CPU fan never really needs to spin up high; good case airflow is key rather than raw fan power. I know that's all probably quite obvious, but I've seen a good many overlook it.

In summary, my own setup is a real workhorse, and I have no plans to upgrade anything right now. Used to, but it's been going so well that I've no plans to change anything. This is partially because in recent years I've noticed software quality improving, and the utilisation of the graphics card improving as well (i.e the GPU is shouldering a lot more of the burden, leaving the CPU free for other tasks).

--edit: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided I can't play the native version. wine+DXVK and the GOG version though, after some shader caching, runs just fine. Rise of the Tomb Raider is without issue (doesn't even stutter for me anywhere - and that's the Feral version of course). Shadow of the Tomb Raider I can't play on it (instruction set issue). Doom used to run fine when it ran, but some update broke it for me (now I play it through Stadia, don't judge!). Total Warhammer II is fine, 3 Kingdoms is fine, basically any of the Total War series with Vulkan run completely fine.

This was pretty much what I had in mind. The issues with instructions are annoying because often times there are workarounds which means that the games don't actually require them, it's more an artificial way of gatekeeping old hardware rather than the parts actually not being able to run the game. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia/AMD/Intel pay engine makers; publishers and developers to do this. Overall I think this has made me more inclined to do this build so thanks for the detailed post. Just pulled the trigger on a pair of Opteron 6328's for $60 USD off Ebay to kick things off. Worse comes to worse i'm sure they'll be fine for FOSS games or games that use FOSS engines.

The games I know of that use unsupported instructions are either because some middleware needs them (one was for a video codec during the game intro, of all the silly things), or the compiler flags were set to native on whatever the build machine was.

I've had a chat to someone who basically said they try, but there needs to be a baseline at some point and, well, if the compiler chooses then the compiler chooses. I completely understand that perspective - they don't go out of the way to break anything, but they don't test on something as old as my CPU either.

Anyway, let us know how it unfolds!

I had a dual 6378 system with and RX 580 and then a Vega64 until late 2020 that ran most games just fine. The main issue issue I had is how the system managed threads. I found that it was best to start games assigning the affinity to the first cpu to avoid latency issues. This can depend on what PCIe slot you are using for the GPU. I was also using an overclocking bios on a Supermicro board.