Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM 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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peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Of course. Work CPUs must be tested at work. Kiddies are fine with i3s.Ian Cutress - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
https://myhacker.net hacking news hacking tutorials hacking ebooksIGTrading - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
It would be nice and very useful to post some power consumption results at the platform level, if we're doing "extra" additional testing.It is very important since we're paying for the motherboard just as much as we pay for a Ryzen 5 or even Ryzen 7 processor.
And it will correctly compare the TCO of the X399 platform with the TCO of X299.
jordanclock - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
So it looks like AMD should have gone with just disabling SMT for Game Mode. There are way more benefits and it is easier to understand the implications. I haven't seen similar comparisons for Intel in a while, perhaps that can be exploration for Skylake-X as well?HStewart - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I would think disable SMT would be better, but the reason maybe in designed of link between the two 8 Core dies on chip.GruenSein - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I'd really love to see a frame time probability distribution (Frame time on x-axis, rate of occurrence on y-axis). Especially in cases with very unlikely frames below a 60Hz rate, the difference between TR and TR-GM/1800X seem most apparent. Without the distribution, we will never know if we are seeing the same distribution but slightly shifted towards lower frame rates as the slopes of the distribution might be steep. However, those frames with frame times above a 60Hz rate might be real stutters down to a 30Hz rate but they might just as well be frames at a 59,7Hz rate. I realize why this threshold was selected but every threshold is quite arbitrary.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Does AMD comment on the update? What's their reason for choosing 8C/16T over 16C/16T?> One could postulate that Windows could do something similar with the equivalent of hyperthreads.
They're actually already doing that. Loading 50% of all threads on an SMT machine will result in ~50% average load on every logical core, i.e. all physical cores are only working on 1 thread at a time.
I know mathematically other schedulings are possible, leading to the same result - but by now I think it's common knowledge that the default Win scheduler works like that. Hence most lightly threaded software is indifferent to SMT. Except games.
NetMage - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Then why did SMT mode show differences from Creator mode in the original review?Dribble - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
No one is ever going to run game mode - why buy a really expensive chip and then disable half of it, especially as you have to reboot to do it? It's only use is to make threadripper look slightly better in reviews. Imo it would be more honest as a reviewer to just run it in creator mode all the time.jordanclock - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
The point is compatibility, as mentioned in the article multiple times. AMD is offering this as an option for applications (mainly games) that do not run correctly, if at all, on >16 core CPUs.