Hi everyone,
I’ve been managing a small cluster of dedicated servers for my friend group for a few years now, mostly running a mix of Rust, Assetto Corsa, and a fairly heavily modded Minecraft instance. Lately, our old hardware has been struggling to keep up as we add more games to the rotation, so I’ve been looking into finally moving toward a proper rack-mount setup.
One thing I’m debating right now is the classic trade-off between raw core count and single-thread speed. I've found a decent deal on a server featuring an EPYC 48-core processor clocked at 2.75GHz . On paper, having 96 threads sounds like a dream for running dozens of Docker containers or headless instances without them stepping on each other's toes.
However, a specific point I'm stuck on is that many game engines are still notoriously poorly threaded. My current concern is that even if I can technically host twenty different servers, if a single instance of something like Rust hits a performance wall because it can't push a single core hard enough, all those extra cores won't actually help with the tick rate. I’m currently coming from a consumer-grade chip that hits much higher frequencies, so I’m a little nervous about moving to a 2.75GHz base, even with the massive L3 cache that EPYC provides.
In my experience, players really start to feel it when the server side can't keep up with physics calculations, regardless of how much RAM you throw at it. I’d love to have the "infinite" overhead for multitasking, but not at the cost of the actual gameplay experience.
For those of you running high-density environments, do you find that modern architectural improvements make up for lower clock speeds, or is frequency still king in the game hosting world?