Before Vulkan, there were more bottlenecks on multithreaded rendering. Most games pushed everything to a single drawing thread.
Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck.
Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.
that reminds me of what I had read on EverQuest 2. I downloaded it when it went f2p years after launch. My gaming PC had some issues with it which seemed nuts as it could handle more intensive games. After reading up on it, EQ2 came about a little bit before the shift to multiple cores which was to their detriment: they basically expected single core performance to keep going up substantially (as it had during EQ1 era) and not expanding to multiple cores. As such, they optimized against a configuration that never ended up existing.
The Witcher 3 likes all 12 cores on my Ryzen 9 3900X when running in Wine+dxvk, thanks to Vulkan (especially for faster shader compilation). Same as they are useful for compiling Mesa and Linux kernel ;)
Hopefully going forward that will change, but even with Red Dead Redemption 2's Vulkan implementation, a 6 core Intel/AMD chip is competitive with this processor at lower settings/resolutions where the GPU is less of a bottleneck.
Compute bound games like Civilization 6 do scale with processor count however.