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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imaheadcase - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
So you lost respect for a website based on how they word titles of articles? I think you don't understand advertising at all. lolIf you want to know a website that lost respect, look at HardOCP and you know why people don't like them for obvious reasons.
Alexey291 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
No offence but HardOCP is far more respectable than what we have in ATech these days.But that's not hard. AT website is pretty much a shell for the forum which is where most of the traffic is. I'm sure they only so the reviews because 'it was something we have always done'
Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
You may not understand how wording is used to convey sentiments in a different way. That is what politicians thrive on. You could for instance say "I am sorry that you misunderstood me." It gives the impression that you are sorry, but you are not. People also ask for forgiveness like this: "If I have hurt you, please forgive me." It sounds sincer, but it is a hidden lie, not acknowledging that you have actually hurt anybody, actually saying that you do not think that you did.Well, this is a science and I cannot explain it all here. If you miss it, then it does not mean it is not there.
mikato - Monday, August 14, 2017 - link
I thought I'd just comment to say I understand what you're saying and agree. Even if a sentence gives facts, it can sound more positive one way or another way based on how it is stated. The author has to do some reflection sometimes to catch this. I believe him whenever he says he doesn't have much time, and maybe that plays into it. But articles at different sites may not have this bias effect and it can be an important component of a review article."Intel recently announced that its new 18-core chip scores 3200 on Cinebench R15. That would be an extra 6.7% performance over the Threadripper 1950X for 2x the cost."
These 2 sentences give facts, but sound favorable to Intel until just the very end. It's a subtle perception thing but it's real. The facts in the sentences, however, are massively favorable to AMD. Threadripper does only 6.7% less performance than an announced (not yet released) Intel CPU for half the cost!
Here is another version-
"Intel recently announced that its new 18-core chip scores 3200 on Cinebench R15. So Threadripper, for half the cost of Intel's as-yet unreleased chip, performs only 6.7% slower in Cinebench."
There, that one leads with Threadripper and "half the cost" in the second sentence, and sounds much different.
Johan Steyn - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
HardOCP and PCPer is more respected in my opinion. Wccftech is unpredictable, sometimes they shine and sometimes they are really odd.mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I've kinda taken to GamersNexus recently, but I still always read AT and toms to compare.Ian.
fanofanand - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link
WCCFtech is a joke, it's nothing but rumors and trolling. If you are seriously going to put WCCFtech above Anandtech then everyone here can immediately disregard all of your comments.Drumsticks - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Fantastic review In. I was curious exactly how AMD would handle the NUMA problem with Threadripper. It seems that anybody buying Threadripper for real work is going to have to continue being very aware of exactly what configuration gets them the best performance.One minor correction, at the bottom of the CPU Rendering tests page:
"Intel recently announced that its new 18-core chip scores 3200 on Cinebench R15. That would be an extra 6.7% performance over the Threadripper 1950X for 2x the cost." - this score is for the 16 core i9-7960X, not the 7980XE.
Drumsticks - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Ian*. Can't wait for the edit button one day!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?