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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Kjella - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
In the not so distant past - like last year - you'd have to pay Intel some seriously overpriced HEDT money for 6+ cores. Ryzen gave us 8 cores and most games can't even use that. ThreadRipper is a kick-ass processor in the workstation market. Why anyone would consider it for gaming I have no idea. It's giving you tons of PCIe lanes just as AMD is downplaying CF with Vega, nVidia has offically dropped 3-way/4-way support, even 2-way CF/SLI has been a hit-and-miss experience. I went from a dual card setup to a single 1080 Ti, don't think I'll ever do multi-GPU again.tamalero - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Probably their target is for those systems that have tons of cards with SATA RAID ports or PCI-E accelerators like AMD's or Nvidia's?mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
And then there's GPU acceleration for rendering (eg. CUDA) where the SLI/CF modes are not needed at all. Here's my old X79 CUDA box with quad 900MHz GTX 580 3GB:http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/3930K_quad580_13.jp...
I recall someone who does quantum chemistry saying they make significant use of multiple GPUs, and check out the OctaneBench CUDA test, the top spot has eleven 1080 Tis. :D (PCIe splitter boxes)
GreenMeters - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
There is no such thing as SHED. Ryzen is a traditional desktop part. That it raises the bar in that segment compared to Intel's offering is a good thing--a significant performance and feature boost that we haven't seen in years. Threadripper is a HEDT part. That it raises the bar in that segment compared to Intel's offering is a good thing--a significant performance and feature boost that we haven't seen in years.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Ryzen 7 was set as a HEDT directly against Intel's HEDT competition. This is a new socket and a new set over and above that, and not to mention that Intel will be offering its HCC die on a consumer platform for the first time, increasing the consumer core count by 8 in one generation which has never happened before. If what used to be HEDT is still HEDT, then this is a step above.Plus, AMD call it something like UHED internally. I prefer SHED.
FreckledTrout - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I think AMD has the better division of what is and isn't HEDT. Going forward Intel really should follow suite and make it 8+ cores to get into the HEDT lineup as what they have done this go around is just confusing and a bit goofy.ajoy39 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Small nitpick but"AMD could easily make those two ‘dead’ silicon packages into ‘real’ silicon packages, and offer 32 cores"
That's exactly what the, already announced, EPYC parts are doing is it not?
Great review otherwise, these parts are intriguing but I don't personally have a workload that would suit them. Excited to see what sort of innovation this brings about though, about time Intel had some competition at this end of the market.
Dr. Swag - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
I assume they're referring to putting 32 cores on TR4mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Presumably a relevant difference being that such a 32c TR would have the use of all of its I/O connections, instead of some of them used to connect to other EPYC units. OTOH, with a 32c TR, how the heck could mbd vendors cram enough RAM slots on a board to feed the 8 channels? Either that or stick with 8 slots and just fiddle around somehow so that the channel connections match the core count in a suitable manner, eg. one per channel for 32c, 2 per channel for 16c, etc.Who knows whether AMD would ever release a full 32c TR for TR4 socket, but at least the option is there I suppose if enough people buy it would happily go for a 32c part (depends on the task).
smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Considering the TDP with just a 16C chip to go 32C would hit the clock speeds badly unless they were able to keep the turbo speeds when ONLY 16 or less of the cores are loaded?The 32C server parts have much lower max turbo speeds seemingly when less loaded.