The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.
Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.
Where the old game had one benchmark scene, the new game has three different scenes with different requirements: Spine of the Mountain (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Geothermal Valley (3-Mountain) - and we test all three (and yes, I need to relabel them - I got them wrong when I set up the tests). These are three scenes designed to be taken from the game, but it has been noted that scenes like 2-Prophet shown in the benchmark can be the most CPU limited elements of that entire level, and the scene shown is only a small portion of that level. Because of this, we report the results for each scene on each graphics card separately.
Graphics options for RoTR are similar to other games in this type, offering some presets or allowing the user to configure texture quality, anisotropic filter levels, shadow quality, soft shadows, occlusion, depth of field, tessellation, reflections, foliage, bloom, and features like PureHair which updates on TressFX in the previous game.
Again, we test at 1920x1080 and 4K using our native 4K displays. At 1080p we run the High preset, while at 4K we use the Medium preset which still takes a sizable hit in frame rate.
It is worth noting that RoTR is a little different to our other benchmarks in that it keeps its graphics settings in the registry rather than a standard ini file, and unlike the previous TR game the benchmark cannot be called from the command-line. Nonetheless we scripted around these issues to automate the benchmark four times and parse the results. From the frame time data, we report the averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
#1 Geothermal Valley Spine of the Mountain
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
#2 Prophet’s Tomb
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
#3 Spine of the Mountain Geothermal Valley
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
The 4K
It's clear from these results that the 1950X is not the best gaming chip when in its default mode.
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launchcodemexico - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Why did you end all the gaming review sections with something like "Switching it to Game mode would have made better numbers..."? Why didn't you run the benchmarks in Gaming mode in the first place?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Gaming mode is not default, and we run gaming mode alongside the default - there's two sets of values in each graming test.DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You might want to call that out more clearly in the text. I also missed that you have two sets of 1950X results; and probably wouldn't've figured out what the -G suffix meant without a hint.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I mentioned it in the Game vs Creator mode page, but I'll propagate it through.lordken - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
read before you complain, it is stated at beginning of the review that -G is for game mode...DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Especially during the work day a lot of people just are doing quick glances at the most interesting parts. I'll end to end read it sometime tonight.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
If people quick-glance, that's their problem for missing key info. :D When learning about something as new as this, I read everything. Otherwise, it's like the tech equivalent of crossing a road while gawping at a phone. :}Last time I read so much about a new CPU launch was Nehalem/X58.
Ian.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
It seemed really clear to me but for people who didn't read the long text on NUMA etc maybe not.The dangers of skimming!
mapesdhs - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Indeed. :D Reminds me of when a long time ebay seller told me that long item decriptions are pointless, because most bidders only read the first paragraph, often only the first sentence.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The test suite is a global glove: rather than have 20 tests for each segment, it's a global band of 80 tests for every situation. Johan does different tests as his office is several hundred miles away from where I am (and we're thousands of miles away from any other reviewer).For the gaming benchmarks, there are big differences in 99th percentile frame rates and Time Under analysis. As games become more and more GPU bottlenecked for average frame rates, this is where the differentiation point is. It's a reason why we still test 1080p as well. With regards the AI test, I've asked the Civ team repeatedly to make the AI test accessible from the command line so I can rope it into my testing scripts easily (they already do it with the main GPU test). But like many other game studios, getting them to unlock a flag is a frustrating endeavor when they don't even respond to messages.