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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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?