The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTRocket League
Hilariously simple pick-up-and-play games are great fun. I'm a massive fan of the Katamari franchise for that reason — passing start on a controller and rolling around, picking up things to get bigger, is extremely simple. Until we get a PC version of Katamari that I can benchmark, we'll focus on Rocket League.
Rocket League combines the elements of pick-up-and-play, allowing users to jump into a game with other people (or bots) to play football with cars with zero rules. The title is built on Unreal Engine 3, which is somewhat old at this point, but it allows users to run the game on super-low-end systems while still taxing the big ones. Since the release in 2015, it has sold over 5 million copies and seems to be a fixture at LANs and game shows. Users who train get very serious, playing in teams and leagues with very few settings to configure, and everyone is on the same level. Rocket League is quickly becoming one of the favored titles for e-sports tournaments, especially when e-sports contests can be viewed directly from the game interface.
Based on these factors, plus the fact that it is an extremely fun title to load and play, we set out to find the best way to benchmark it. Unfortunately for the most part automatic benchmark modes for games are few and far between. Partly because of this, but also on the basis that it is built on the Unreal 3 engine, Rocket League does not have a benchmark mode. In this case, we have to develop a consistent run and record the frame rate.
Read our initial analysis on our Rocket League benchmark on low-end graphics here.
With Rocket League, there is no benchmark mode, so we have to perform a series of automated actions, similar to a racing game having a fixed number of laps. We take the following approach: Using Fraps to record the time taken to show each frame (and the overall frame rates), we use an automation tool to set up a consistent 4v4 bot match on easy, with the system applying a series of inputs throughout the run, such as switching camera angles and driving around.
It turns out that this method is nicely indicative of a real bot match, driving up walls, boosting and even putting in the odd assist, save and/or goal, as weird as that sounds for an automated set of commands. To maintain consistency, the commands we apply are not random but time-fixed, and we also keep the map the same (Aquadome, known to be a tough map for GPUs due to water/transparency) and the car customization constant. We start recording just after a match starts, and record for 4 minutes of game time (think 5 laps of a DIRT: Rally benchmark), with average frame rates, 99th percentile and frame times all provided.
The graphics settings for Rocket League come in four broad, generic settings: Low, Medium, High and High FXAA. There are advanced settings in place for shadows and details; however, for these tests, we keep to the generic settings. For both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we test at the High preset with an unlimited frame cap.
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
With Ryzen, we encounted some odd performance issues when using NVIDIA-based video cards that caused those cards to significantly underperform. However equally strangely, the issues we have with Ryzen on Rocket League with NVIDIA GPUs seem to almost vanish when using Threadripper. Again, still no easy wins here as Intel seems to take Rocket League in its stride, but SMT-off mode still helps the 1950X. The Time Under graphs give some cause for concern, with the 1950X consistently being at the bottom of that graph.
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verl - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
"well above the Ryzen CPUs, and batching the 10C/8C parts from Broadwell-E and Haswell-E respectively"??? From the Power Consumption page.
bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yep if you use AVX-512 it will down clock to 1.8Ghz and draw 400w just for the CPU alone and 600w from the wall. See der8auer's video title "The X299 VRM Disaster (en)", all x299 motherboards VRMs can be ran into thermal shutdown under avx 512 loads, with just a small overclock, not to mention avx512 crazy power consumption. That is why AMD didn't put avx 512 in Zen, it is power consumption monster.TidalWaveOne - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Glad I went with the 7820X for software development (compiling).raddude9 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
In ars' review they have TR-1950X ahead of the i9-7900X for compilation:https://arstechnica.co.uk/gadgets/2017/08/amd-thre...
In short it's very difficult to test compilation, every project you build has different properties.
emn13 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, the discrepency is huge - converted to anandtech's compile's per day the arstechnica benchmark maxes out at a little less than 20, which is a far cry from the we see here.Clearly, the details of the compiler, settings and codebase (and perhaps other things!) matter hugely.
That's unfortunate, because compilation is annoyingly slow, and it would be a boon to know what to buy to ameliorate that.
prisonerX - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
This is very compiler dependent. My compiler is blazingly fast on my wimpy hardware becuase it's blazingly clever. Most compilers seem to crawl no matter what they run on.bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Looks like anandtech's benchmark for compiling is bunk, it's just way off from all the other benchmarks out there. Not only that, no other test shows a 20% improvement over the 6950x which is also a 10 core/20 thread cpu. Something tells me the 7900x is completely wrong or has something faster like a different pcie ssd.Chad - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
All I know is, for those of us running Plex, SABnzbd, Sonarr, Radarr servers simultaneously (and others), while encoding and gaming all simultaneously, our day has arrived!:)
Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
We checked with Ars as to their method.We use a fixed late March build around v56 under MSVC
Ars use a fixed newer build around v62 via clang-cl using VC++ linking
Same software, different compilers, different methods. Our results are faster than Ars, although Ars' results seem to scale better.
ddriver - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Of every review out there, only your "superior testing methodology" presents a picture where TR is slower than SX.