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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zodiacfml - Monday, August 21, 2017 - link
I agree with the conclusion, just disable SMT and be done with it. With 16 cores, it is overkill for all desktop tasks except for full tilt rendering/encoding.MrRuckus - Tuesday, August 22, 2017 - link
Now overclock it with half the cores enabled and do it again?Thats the only benefit I see from going to TR, is the top 5% of Ryzen cores go on threadripper chips, so its basically the best binned cores. What you can reach with half the cores overclocked would be interesting to see. How much better are the top binned cores compered to say a 1800x? HOCP did a overclocking article on TR, but not with half the cores disabled. They saw better performance by underclocking because if the heat and so many cores. Cut the cores in half and see what it'll do?
Ian Cutress - Friday, August 25, 2017 - link
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This was quite useful to me. I wasn't aware of the Ryzen Master software prior to this article, and I was having SLI scaling issues/poor performance in gaming (not horrible, but not what I would have expected from a $700 CPU, the 1920x). Using Gaming Mode has helped tremendously.. My 3dMark Firestrike score went up about 4500 points simply by engaging Gaming Mode, and a bit more after a modest overclock. The ability to swap back and forth is pretty handy, as I can re-enable the full set of cores when I want to encode a video for example with the push of a button (and a quick reboot).