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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Pekish79 - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Vraybench 1.0.5SanX - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
*** AMD, make 2-chip mobos for upcoming multicore wars, you will double your profit from this at no cost for you +++vicbee - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Off subject: Having just read the article about nVidia's meteoric rise in profits, some of which directly attributed to high end "gamers" video cards purchased expressly for coin mining, I wonder if it and AMD are going to manufacture CPU's and GPU's specifically for that purpose and how that will affect the price of said parts...Avro Arrow - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Hi Ian, thanks for doing this article. It's important to see all possible outcomes because in the real world, anything is possible. I do have one question that has be puzzled. Why do you say that Threadripper only has 64 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes when it's been reported several times by everyone, including official AMD releases (and also including by you) that it has 64? I thought it might be just a typo but you state it in several places and in all of your specs. This is not a new thing so is there something about Threadripper that we don't know?HotJob - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Could someone explain to me what a "2P" system is from the competition section of the article?coolhardware - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
"2P" system = two processor system, i.e. a system with two physical CPU sockets and two CPUs installed.In the past a 2P (or 4P) system was really handy to get more cores especially back when 1 core, 2 core, and eventually 4 core CPUs were high end. In the consumer realm, way back, the Pentium II was the first 2P system I ever built and people even did it with Celerons as well:
http://www.cpu-central.com/dualceleron/
the Opterons were also fun for dual or quad processor systems including some SFF options like the ZMAX-DP socket 940 system.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N...
Now fast forward with ThreadRipper already available at Amazon and NewEgg
http://amzn.to/2wDqgWw (URL shortened)
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N...
I do not think I will ever be building a 2P or 4P system again!!!
:-)
rvborgh - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
hi Ian,i think the Cinebench 11.5 benchmarks are incorrect for both ThreadRippers. ThreadRipper is almost equivalent to my Quad Opteron (48 core) system which scores 3229cb on R15... and 39.04 on Cinebench 11.5. if i downclock all cores to approximately 2.9 GHz i end up with around 3000cb in R15 and in the 36 range point range for 11.5.
The fact that you are only scoring in the 18 range makes me wonder if you had the Threadripper set in some mode where it was only using 8 out of the 16 cores. Can you verify this... please? Thanks :) i would think you should see scores in the 36 range with 11.5.
Other than this minor detail... great article.
PS: i've had the same issues with software not liking NUMA on my quad opteron system as well... Cinebench especially does not like it.
Tchamber - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Hi, Ian. Thanks for the review. As usual it was in depth and informative. I'm in the middle of building a 1700x system now based on your review. I wanted to say you handle all the nay-Sayers, gloomy Gusses and negative Nacies with aplomb! I think most people's own slant colors how they see your reviews. I appreciate the consistency of what you do here. I took a look over at Ars, and they could be called AMD shills for all the positive things they say... Keep it up!Tchamber - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
P.S.I loved your Kessel Run reference, it tied in nicely with your Yoda quote.
B3an - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
Too many plebs complaining about a lack of 3D rendering benches. The fact is a 16 core CPU is still much slower than GPU's at rendering. I'll be getting a 1950X but it wont even be used for rendering when i know for a fact that my two GPUs will still be much faster with things like Blender. Even a single high-end GPU will still easily beat the 1950X at these tasks.Seems like immature moron fanboys are crying over this stuff because they just want to see AMD at the top of the charts.