Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM 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
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Ian Cutress - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Visit https://myhacker.net For Latest Hacking & security updates.Glock24 - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Ha your account bee hacked Ian? This seems like an out of place comment from a spam bot.zodiacfml - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
Useless. Why cripple an expensive chip? It is already mentioend that the value of high core counts is mega tasking, like rendering while gaming. I wouldn't be to tell a increase in of 10% or less in performance but I will do for multi-tasking.Greyscend - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
To summarize, I can pay $1000 for a new and crazy powerful CPU that gives me the option to turn $500 of it off so that I can sporadically gain performance in games at a level that is mostly equal to or below the level of standard testing deviations? Worth.Greyscend - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
I want competition in the CPU market so I feel like AMD should consider redistributing funds from what can only be described as the "Gimmicks Department" back to the actual processor R&D department. Although, the Gimmicks Department is getting pretty good at UI development. Look at the software they churned out that turns $500 of your CPU off! It's beautiful! They also seem to be getting bolder since they asked Anandtech to effectively re-write an entire article in order to more succinctly point out how consumers can effectively disable half of the CPU cores they paid for with almost no discernible real world effect. Pretty impressive considering the number of consumers who seem genuinely interested in this type of feature.Oxford Guy - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
"research is paramount"Yeah, like the common knowledge that Zen reviews shouldn't be handicapped by only testing them with slow RAM.
Joel Hruska at ExtremeTech tested Ryzen on day 1 with 3200 speed RAM. Tom's tested the latest batch of consumer Zen (Ryzen 3) with 3200.
And yet... this site has apparently just discovered why it's so important to not kneecap Zen with slow RAM — as if we're using ECC for enterprise stuff all the time.
Gastec - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Why such abysmal performance in Rise of the Tomb Raider and GTA5 for Sapphire Nitro R9 and RX480 with Thradripper CPU's?Oxford Guy - Thursday, August 24, 2017 - link
I can't say I'm an expert on this subject but it looks like their tested games generally are a list of some of the poorer performers on AMD. Tomb Raider, GTA5, etc.Dirt 4, by contrast, shows Vega 56 beating a 1080 Ti at Tech Report.
dwade123 - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Threadripper is a mess. There's always a compromise with AMD.mapesdhs - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
Because of course X299 doesn't involve aaany compromise at all. :D