Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCivilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
We tested both of the 1950X and the 1920X at their default settings, as well as the 1950X in Game Mode as shown by 1950X-G.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
8K
16K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
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ddriver - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Why not? We've had 16 core CPUs long before W10 was launched, and it has allegedly been heavily updated since then.But it is NOT the "coder"'s responsibility. Programmers don't get any say, they are paid workers, paid to do as they are told. Not that I don't have the impression that a lot of the code that's being written is below the standard, but the actual decision making is not a product of software programmers but that of software architects, and the latter are even more atrocious than the actual programmers.
HollyDOL - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Sadly, the reality is much worse... those architects are ordered by managers, economic persons etc. who, sadly often, don't know more about computer than where's power button. And they want products with minimal cost and 'yesterday was late'.ddriver - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Well, yeah, the higher you go up the latter the grosser the incompetence level.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Interesting test results. I think they demonstrate pretty clearly why Threadripper isn't really a very good option for pure gaming workloads. The big takeaway is that there are more affordable processors with lower TDPs offer comparable or better performance without adding additional settings that few people will realize exist and even fewer people will fiddle with enough to determine which settings actually improve performance in their particular software library. The Ryzen 7 series is probably a much better overall choice than TR right now if you don't have specific tasks that require all those cores and threads.Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"I think they demonstrate pretty clearly why Threadripper isn't really a very good option for pure gaming workloads."wow.... what a surprise.
thanks for pointing that out mr. obvious. :-)
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
These are single GPU tests. Threadripper has enough PCIe lanes to do large multi GPU systems. More GPU usually trumps better CPU in the high end gaming scene, especially with 4k resolution.BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Yes, but multi-GPU setups are generally not used for gaming-centric operations. There's been tacit acknowledgement of this as the state of things by NV since the release of the 10x0 series. Features like Crossfire and SLI support are barely a bullet point in marketing materials these days. With good reason since game support is waning as well and DX12 is positioned to pretty nail the multi-GPU coffin shut entirely except in corner cases where it MIGHT be possible to leverage an iGPU alongside a dGPU if a game engine developer bothers to invest time into banging out code to support it. That places TR's generous PCIe lane count and the potential multi-GPU usage in the domain of professional workloads that need GPU compute power.Bullwinkle J Moose - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I agree with ddriverWe should not have to fiddle with the settings and reboot to game mode on these things
Windows should handle the hardware seamlessly in the background for whatever end use we put these systems to
The problem is getting Microsoft to let the end users use the full potential of our hardware
If the framework for the hardware is not fully implemented in the O.S., every "FIX" looks a bit like the one AMD is using here
I think gaming on anything over 4 cores might require a "proper" update from Microsoft working with the hardware manufacturers
Sometimes it might be nice to use the full potential of the systems we have instead of Microsoft deciding that all of our problems can be fixed with another cloud service
Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
but but.. what about linux.i mean linux is the savior, not?
it has not won a 2.2% marketshare on teh desktop for nothing.
sarcasm off....
HomeworldFound - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
What can we expect Microsoft to do prior to a product like this launching. If a processor operates in a manner that requires the operating system to be adjusted, the company selling it needs to approach Microsoft and provide an implementation, and it should be ready for launch. If that isn't possible then why manufacture something that doesn't work correctly and requires hacky fixes to run.