Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTGrand Theft Auto
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low-end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
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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Aisalem - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Ok, I'm a noob then, actually I'm an engineer who's doing designs in AutoCad, Creo and Solidworks but from time to time like to play few games.So yes I'm a NOOB who has some free cash to throw AMD direction and would like to know what are the best settings for it to play a game once or twice a week without spending hours on testing those.
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
That makes you a workstation user, not a noob who buys Threadripper just for games.pepoluan - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Why do you want to change to Game Mode anyways? Is playing in Creator Mode not Good Enough for you?Ratman6161 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Actually you sound more like the actual target audience for game mode. But for your purposes I would think you would want reviews with more heavy emphasis on workstation tasks. Gaming with it is just a sidelight.Greyscend - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
If you really are an engineer you shouldn't need hours to figure out if you can disable SMT while "Game Mode" is active. In fact, you shouldn't even need "hours" to turn on game mode and play a few minutes of your current, favorite game, then turn off SMT (if possible in game mode) and play again. I'm no engineer but I would have to be on Peyote and a bottle of wine to make all of this take longer than 30 minutes. Also, you may find that the bleeding edge isn't the best place for people who need to be told exactly how to configure their own machines.Ratman6161 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Exactly"For the average person reading most of tech sites the more workstation benchmarks doesn't really makes sense."
Counter point: The "more workstation benchmarks" and the tasks they represent are the reason this CPU exists in the first place. If you want a Ryzen and gaming is your primary use, you would be better off with something in the R7 family since when you disable half the cores, you effectively have the equivalent of an 1800x.
The only reason game mode would exist is for someone who really needs to do those "more workstation" tasks for work purposes but also wants to to use the same machine for games when not doing actual work. IMO, the reviews should really stick even more to workstation use cases with gaming being an "oh, by the way, you can play games on it too" sort of deal.
Ian Cutress - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
https://myhacker.net | Hacking Tutorials | Hacking news | hacking tools | hacking ebooksGothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
waiting for anandtech praising the 8% on average performance boost of the 9000 intel cpu generation.... :-)peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
3%peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Been this way for the last 5 generations. Moore's law is over.