Does cache help some things sure, but not a replacement for bandwidth. I have seen cases where the zen 3 X3D wins against the zen 4 without X3D, especially on simulations, emulators, flight sims, etc.
Sadly there seems to be movements all over the industry to depend on caching over bandwidth and generally they win benchmarks, but often lose on real world use. Intel N100 and similar embedded type chips for appliances/routers went from 128 bit wide to 64. The M2 Pro has 256 bit wide memory and the M3 pro went to 192 bit wide. The Nvidia 3060 Ti 256 bit wide memory has 4060 Ti went down to 128 bit wide.
Sure the average performance is often higher (when cache friendly), but the performance is much more variable as the ratio between in cache performance and out of cache performance gets larger. GPUs with more cache and less bandwidth tend to get pickier about which games they run well on and the 1% lows get slower, which makers stuttering worse.
It's sad that from that for normal desktops from a few $100 to a few $1000 all have 128 bit wide memory interfaces, unless you buy a mac and you can get 128, 256, 512, or 1024 bit wide.
Sadly there seems to be movements all over the industry to depend on caching over bandwidth and generally they win benchmarks, but often lose on real world use. Intel N100 and similar embedded type chips for appliances/routers went from 128 bit wide to 64. The M2 Pro has 256 bit wide memory and the M3 pro went to 192 bit wide. The Nvidia 3060 Ti 256 bit wide memory has 4060 Ti went down to 128 bit wide.
Sure the average performance is often higher (when cache friendly), but the performance is much more variable as the ratio between in cache performance and out of cache performance gets larger. GPUs with more cache and less bandwidth tend to get pickier about which games they run well on and the 1% lows get slower, which makers stuttering worse.
It's sad that from that for normal desktops from a few $100 to a few $1000 all have 128 bit wide memory interfaces, unless you buy a mac and you can get 128, 256, 512, or 1024 bit wide.