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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4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
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Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
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WoWFishmonger - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I thought it was "The proof is in the PUDDING"All this time I've been eating pudding, looking for proof..... explains why I haven't found any yet. :|
Nice write up, its good to see that even if people won't use this new mode, they do have the choice to enable it.
Nothing wrong with choice IMO.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Heh, wow. That's a bad typo. Fixed, thanks :)edzieba - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"I thought it was "The proof is in the PUDDING""The phrase is: "the proof of the pudding is in the eating".
boozed - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
ThisAlexvrb - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
I've always heard "the proof is in the pudding". The shorter version's meaning is still pretty apparent. Plus it rolls off the tongue better, so to speak. Mmmm..... pudding.sprockincat - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
While we're on the topic, I think it's "Game Mode as originally envisioned by AMD."NikosD - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
So, you read my comment regarding your mistake at the first TR review of assuming a 16C/16T CPU after enabling Game Mode instead of a 8C/16T and you corrected that in your new review.Now, you only have to repeat your tests with DDR4-3200 and select a different, more "workstation" kind of benchmarks in order to test monsters of 32 threads and not PDF opening of course !
Mercy !
Aisalem - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
For the average person reading most of tech sites the more workstation benchmarks doesn't really makes sense.What I would like to see if you can enable game mode and disable SMT. That will leave 1950X with 8 cores available to the system which still should be enough for gaming but might present even better results.
Zstream - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
For the love of all things... no one buys TR to just play games, or open .PDF's.Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
well noobs do.but i think websites like anandtech should know better.. but well anand is gone and.
the new generation is obviously no adequat replacement.