The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTCivilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
8K
16K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
1080p
4K
On the whole, the Threadripper CPUs perform as well as Ryzen does on most of the tests, although the Time Under analysis always seems to look worse for Threadripper.
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sorten - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Swole? Threadripped?Rottie - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
AMD Ryzen CPU is not fast enough. Apple is not ready for AMD Ryzen CPU, sorry AMD. I love AMD but I hated Intel even though I have a Skylake based MacBook Pro. :(Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
One small correction, Ryzen has 24 PCIE lanes, not 16. it has 16 for graphics only, but saying only 16 may make people (like me) wonder if you can't run an NVME at x4 and still have the graphics card at 16x, which you totally can do.Deshi! - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
This is under Feeding the beast section btw, where you said "Whereas Ryzen 7 only had 16 PCIe lanes, competing in part against CPUs from Intel that had 28/44 PCIe lanes,"fanofanand - Tuesday, August 15, 2017 - link
He already answered this question/statement to someone else. there are 20 lanes from the CPU, 16 of which are available for graphics. I don't think his way of viewing it seems accurate, but he has stated that this is how PCIe lanes have been counted "for decades"WaltC - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Nice review, btw! Yes, going all the way back to Athlon and the triumph of DDR-Sdram over Rdram, and the triumph of AMD's x86-64 over Itanium (Itanium having been Intel's only "answer" for 64-bit desktop computing post the A64 launch--other than to have actually paid for and *run* an Intel ad campaign stating "You don't need 64-bits on the desktop", believe it or not), and going all the way back to Intel's initial Core 2 designs, the products that *actually licensed x86-64 from AMD* (so that Intel could compete in the 64-bit desktop space it claimed didn't exist), it's really remarkable how much AMD has done to enervate and energize the x86 computing marketplace globally. Interestingly enough it's been AMD, not Intel, that has charted the course for desktop computing globally--and it goes all the way back to the original AMD Athlon. The original Pentium designs--I owned 90MHz and 100MHz Pentiums before I moved to AMD in 1999--were the high-point of an architecture that Intel would *cancel* shortly thereafter simply because it could not compete with the Athlon and its spin-off architectures like the A64. That which is called "Pentium" today is not...;) Intel simply has continued to use the brand. All I can say is: TGF AMD...;) I've tried to imagine where Intel would have taken the desktop computing market had consumers allowed the company to lead them around by the nose, and I can't...;) If not for AMD *right now* and all the activity the company is bringing to the PC space once again, there would not be much of a PC market globally going on. But now that we have some *action* again and Intel is breaking its legs trying to keep up, the PC market is poised to break out of the doldrums! I guess Intel had decided to simply nap for a few decades--"Wake me when some other company does something we'll have to compete with!" Ugh.zeroidea - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Hi Ian,On the Civ 6 benchmark page, all results after the GTX 1080 are mislabeled as GTA 6.
Ahmad Rady - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Can you try to test this CPU using windows server?This is a MCM CPU looks like 4 CPUs attached to each other.
I think windows 10 Pro can't get the most of this CPU unless we have windows 10 Pro for WS
Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Vray has a Rendering Benchmark too maybe you could use bothPekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
I went to check both page of Vray and Corona BenchmarkCorona match more or less the graphic and Vray has the following
AMD 1950 : 00:46-00:48 sec
I9 7900: 00:54-00:56 sec
I7 6950: 01:00-01:10 sec
I5 5960: 01:23-01:33 sec