I've tested Asus Turbo Game Mode for AMD processors and my verdict was simple: Don't Use it

We live in strange times. Imagine you spent a lot of money on a brand-new Ryzen 99950X processor. It has 16 cores and 32 threads. It's a powerful CPU, but not the best for gaming. Asus claims to have a solution for this problem in the form a new Turbo Game Mode that reduces the number cores and threads by half.

Turbo Game Mode (TGM), in particular, disables one of the Core Complex Dies (CCDs) and SMTs (Simultaneous Multithreading). It turns a processor like the 9950X, into an 8-core 8-thread processor. Some games don't like threads spread across multiple dies or cores.

To see if it was the case with any of the games from our CPU benchmarking suite I ran them afresh using the beta 2505 bios for the Asus RoG Crosshair X670E Hero board. The test setup consisted of a Ryzen 9 9950X, 32 GB DDR5-6000 CL28 memory, a GeForce GTX 4070 and Windows 23H2.

You can check the results yourself, but to summarize, Cyberpunk and Baldur's Gate 3 performed worse with TGM enabled. Metro Exodus, Total War: Warhammer 3 and Homeworld 3 performed the same way as they did without it.

It's a mixed bag, but when Homeworld 3 ran only 2% faster on average and Factorio was 5% faster, it raises the simple question: is it worth using at all?

It's important to note that this is a BIOS setting and not something you can toggle on and off in Windows. TGM ruins the CPU’s ability to create content, so you wouldn't use it in this situation.

You'd be annoyed if you had to restart your PC every time you wanted a different game.

When I first reviewed AMD Dual CCD Zen 5 Chips, the Ryzen 9 9900X & 9950X, I noticed the recommended power settings made things worse. AMD recommended that you use the Balanced power profile from the old Control Panel, and then Best Performance or Balanced in Windows settings.

This configuration would enable AMD's drivers, when a game was detected, to activate core parking for the second CCD. From the perspective of a game, you would turn the 9950X chip into an 8-core 16-thread one. This didn't help at all, and the review performance numbers were collected using the High Performance Control Panel (i.e. no core parking).

After a few years, there have been many updates to AMD's driver, Windows and AM5 motherboard BIOS. I decided to go back and see if they had improved the recommended power profiles.

They're not. Or at least, not with my configuration. High Performance/Best Performace still produces better results that Balanced/Best Performace, even though the gap is smaller now than it was initially.

I've only tried five games so far, but I'm certain there are many games that would benefit from Turbo Game Mode. It's a pain to have to go into the BIOS every time to change it. I don't think many people will use it if it doesn't make any difference.

It's nice that you can quickly disable SMT and shut off one CCD by selecting one option rather than having to dig through the BIOS and do it all manually. But it's only for a select few. All others should leave it alone, and enjoy their AMD CPUs as AMD intended them to be--full of cores, Threads, and gaming goodness.