The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTShadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
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ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
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Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Adding useless singe thread benchs for people that will pay $600+ for many cores is plain stupidity like that useless open a pdf test.casperes1996 - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Why do you bother replying to these, Ian? I love your enthusiasm about what you do, and am happy that you reply to comments, but as you state yourself, no matter what you say, you'll be called a shill on more than a weekly basis by either side no matter what you do. Intel shill, AMD shill, Apple shill, Nvidia shill and so on. There's no stopping it, because you just can't please the people who go into something wanting a specific result. Well, you can if you give them that result, but sometimes, facts aren't what you want them to be, and some people don't accept that.Cheers, mate
Diji1 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You sound like a crazy person.Notmyusualid - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
@ Diji1You are correct.
He is implying just because we want HEDT platforms / chips, that we care nothing for single-threaded performance.
He is a true AMD fan-boi, as you will see over time.
lordken - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
@Johan Steyn: while I agree with you that the Intel piece with PR slide at the top was a little bit lame, I even lolled at "most scalable" part (isn't something like "glued" zen the most scalable design?) I think this review is good and goes also around architecture etc., there were few instances during reading when it seemed odd wording or being unnecessarily polite toward intel's shortcoming/deficit but I cant even remember them now.Though I was surprised about power numbers, as Toms measured much higher W for 7900X , 160-200 and with TTF even up to 250-331 , but here 7800/7900x had only ~150W.
Also this sentence is odd
"All the Threadripper CPUs hit around 177W, just under the 180W TDP, while the Skylake-X CPUs move to their 140W TDP." move to their? They are above the TDP...why not state it clearly?
tamalero - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Im sratching my head on power consumption as well. Almost all reviewers shows that the i9's consume more than threadripper.Could be the motherboard used?
Some used the Zenith and other reviewers used the ASROCK retail one.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Power consumption can vary a lot depending on the type of task and the exact nature of that task.So you should expect a lot of variation across reviews.
Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The amount of tests on games in this review is unbalanced. Also read my reply to Ian.Extremely well stated: " unnecessarily polite toward Intel's shortcoming" Sometimes I think these guys think all are complete mindless drones.
carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
It has always been like this here. This was pretty neutral by Anandtech standards, they even admitted it when it was faster.Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Please read my response to Ian, I think you are not looking close enough to what is happening here.