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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Lolimaster - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Adding useless singe thread benchs for people that will pay $600+ for many cores is plain stupidity like that useless open a pdf test.casperes1996 - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Why do you bother replying to these, Ian? I love your enthusiasm about what you do, and am happy that you reply to comments, but as you state yourself, no matter what you say, you'll be called a shill on more than a weekly basis by either side no matter what you do. Intel shill, AMD shill, Apple shill, Nvidia shill and so on. There's no stopping it, because you just can't please the people who go into something wanting a specific result. Well, you can if you give them that result, but sometimes, facts aren't what you want them to be, and some people don't accept that.Cheers, mate
Diji1 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You sound like a crazy person.Notmyusualid - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
@ Diji1You are correct.
He is implying just because we want HEDT platforms / chips, that we care nothing for single-threaded performance.
He is a true AMD fan-boi, as you will see over time.
lordken - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
@Johan Steyn: while I agree with you that the Intel piece with PR slide at the top was a little bit lame, I even lolled at "most scalable" part (isn't something like "glued" zen the most scalable design?) I think this review is good and goes also around architecture etc., there were few instances during reading when it seemed odd wording or being unnecessarily polite toward intel's shortcoming/deficit but I cant even remember them now.Though I was surprised about power numbers, as Toms measured much higher W for 7900X , 160-200 and with TTF even up to 250-331 , but here 7800/7900x had only ~150W.
Also this sentence is odd
"All the Threadripper CPUs hit around 177W, just under the 180W TDP, while the Skylake-X CPUs move to their 140W TDP." move to their? They are above the TDP...why not state it clearly?
tamalero - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Im sratching my head on power consumption as well. Almost all reviewers shows that the i9's consume more than threadripper.Could be the motherboard used?
Some used the Zenith and other reviewers used the ASROCK retail one.
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Power consumption can vary a lot depending on the type of task and the exact nature of that task.So you should expect a lot of variation across reviews.
Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The amount of tests on games in this review is unbalanced. Also read my reply to Ian.Extremely well stated: " unnecessarily polite toward Intel's shortcoming" Sometimes I think these guys think all are complete mindless drones.
carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
It has always been like this here. This was pretty neutral by Anandtech standards, they even admitted it when it was faster.Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Please read my response to Ian, I think you are not looking close enough to what is happening here.