The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTAshes of the Singularity Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, and 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
AMD gets in the mix a lot with these tests, and in a number of cases pulls ahead of the Ryzen chips in the Time Under analysis.
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Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
A single 1950X destroyed 80% of the intel xeon lineup.Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Any cpu after nehalem perform enough at single thread except for software optimized too much for certain brands, like dolphin and intel.Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Specially when every cpu right now autoclocks to 4Ghz on ST tasks. Single thread is just an obsolete metric when just the most basic of tasks will use it, tasks the last thing you will worry is speed, maybe curse about that piece of c*rap not using 80% of you cpu resources.ZeroPointEF - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I would love to see more VM benchmarking on these types of CPUs. I would also love to see how a desktop performs on top of a Server 2016 hypervisor with multiple servers (Windows and Linux) running on top of the same hypervisor.ZeroPointEF - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I should have made it clear that I loved the review. Ian's reviews are always great!I would just like to see these types of things in addition. It seems like we are getting to a point where we can have our own home lab and a desktop all on one machine on top of a hypervisor, but this idea may be my own strange dream.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
And others would like to know how it works at video editing or as a DAW etc.To add a whole bunch of demanding benchmarks just for HEDT systems is a hell of a lot of work for little return for a site whose main focus is the mainstream.
Try looking at more specialised reviews.
johnnycanadian - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
This, please! My TR purchase is hinging on the performance of multiple VMWare VMs all running full-out at least 18 hours per day.Ian, I'd love to see some of your compute-intensive multi-core benches running on a Linux host with Linux-based VMWare VMs (OpenCV analysis, anyone? Send me that 1950x and I'll happily run SIFT and SURF analysis all day long for you :-). I was delighted by the non-gaming benchmarks shown first in this review and hope to see more professional benches on Anand. Leave the gamerkids to Tom's or HardOCP (or at least limit gaming benchmarks to hardware that is built for it): Anandtech has always been more about folks who make their living on HPDC, and I have nothing but the highest respect for the technical staff at this publication.
I don't give a monkey's about RGB lighting, tempered glass cases, 4k gaming or GTAV FPS. How machines like Threadripper perform in a HPC environment is going to keep AMD in this market, and I sincerely hope they prove to be viable.
mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yes, I was pleased to see the non-gaming tests presented first, makes a change, and at least a subtle nod to the larger intended market for TR.Ian.
pm9819 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Your going to spend a $1000 on cpu but have no clue how it handles the tasks you need it for, smh. As a VMWare customer they will tell you which cpu has been certified to handle a specific tasked. You don't need a random website to tell you that.nitin213 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Hi IanIt's a great review but i do have some suggestions on the test suite. The test suite for this CPU was not materially different from test suites of many of the other desktop CPUs done earlier. I think it would be great to see some tests which explicitly put to use the multi-threaded capabilities and the insane IOs of the system to test, e.g server hosting with how many users being able to login, virtual machines, more productivity test suites when put together with a multi-GPU setup (running adobe creator or similar) etc. I think a combination of your epyc test suite and your high-end GPU test suite would probably be best suited for this.
Also, for the gaming benchmark, it seemed you had 1080, 1060, rx580 and rx480 GPUs. Not sure if these were being bottlenecked by GPU with differences in framerates being semantic and not necessarily a show of PC strength. Also, Civ 6 AI test suite would a great addition as that really stresses the CPU.
i completely understand that there is only so much that can be done in a limited timeframe typically made available for these reviews but would be great to see these tests in future iterations and updates.