The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM 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
Depending on the CPU, for the most part Threadripper performs near to Ryzen or just below it.
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Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
We ran with both and give the data for both. Gaming Mode is not default, and it may surprise you just how many systems are still run at default settings.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Just a thought, might it be possible for AMD to include logic in the design which can tell when it's doing something would probably run better in the other mode, and if so notify the user of this?zepi - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Which 7-zip version are you actually using? Do you really run version 9.2 as stated in the article?Latest stable should be something like 16.x and 17.x's are also available.
zepi - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Your numbers look somewhat different compared to some sites that have been using 17.x versions.DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Keeping the version constant means you can compare against a huge backlog of old data without having to rerun anything and having to drop any systems you can't get working or were only loaners.Alexey291 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yes and also means that the results are useless.tamalero - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Agree. Its like running a benchmark suit that cant handle more than 8 threads.. because "back in the days" there were only dual core processors.Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Its called slanted journalism, just another example.zepi - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Exactly. We don't test GPU's with Quake 2 only to have comparable benchmark results against Voodoo 3.And almost no-one running 7zip today (be it on Core 2 quad OR Core i9) won't be running these ancient versions. Results on those versions are just meaningless in todays environment.
zepi - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
princess and half a kingdom for functional edit.