Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider (1080p, 4K)
One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.
Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.
Where the old game had one benchmark scene, the new game has three different scenes with different requirements: Spine of the Mountain (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Geothermal Valley (3-Mountain) - and we test all three (and yes, I need to relabel them - I got them wrong when I set up the tests). These are three scenes designed to be taken from the game, but it has been noted that scenes like 2-Prophet shown in the benchmark can be the most CPU limited elements of that entire level, and the scene shown is only a small portion of that level. Because of this, we report the results for each scene on each graphics card separately.
Graphics options for RoTR are similar to other games in this type, offering some presets or allowing the user to configure texture quality, anisotropic filter levels, shadow quality, soft shadows, occlusion, depth of field, tessellation, reflections, foliage, bloom, and features like PureHair which updates on TressFX in the previous game.
Again, we test at 1920x1080 and 4K using our native 4K displays. At 1080p we run the High preset, while at 4K we use the Medium preset which still takes a sizable hit in frame rate.
It is worth noting that RoTR is a little different to our other benchmarks in that it keeps its graphics settings in the registry rather than a standard ini file, and unlike the previous TR game the benchmark cannot be called from the command-line. Nonetheless we scripted around these issues to automate the benchmark four times and parse the results. From the frame time data, we report the averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
#1 Geothermal Valley Spine of the Mountain
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
#2 Prophet’s Tomb
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
#3 Spine of the Mountain Geothermal Valley
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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ddriver - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Why not? We've had 16 core CPUs long before W10 was launched, and it has allegedly been heavily updated since then.But it is NOT the "coder"'s responsibility. Programmers don't get any say, they are paid workers, paid to do as they are told. Not that I don't have the impression that a lot of the code that's being written is below the standard, but the actual decision making is not a product of software programmers but that of software architects, and the latter are even more atrocious than the actual programmers.
HollyDOL - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Sadly, the reality is much worse... those architects are ordered by managers, economic persons etc. who, sadly often, don't know more about computer than where's power button. And they want products with minimal cost and 'yesterday was late'.ddriver - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Well, yeah, the higher you go up the latter the grosser the incompetence level.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Interesting test results. I think they demonstrate pretty clearly why Threadripper isn't really a very good option for pure gaming workloads. The big takeaway is that there are more affordable processors with lower TDPs offer comparable or better performance without adding additional settings that few people will realize exist and even fewer people will fiddle with enough to determine which settings actually improve performance in their particular software library. The Ryzen 7 series is probably a much better overall choice than TR right now if you don't have specific tasks that require all those cores and threads.Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
"I think they demonstrate pretty clearly why Threadripper isn't really a very good option for pure gaming workloads."wow.... what a surprise.
thanks for pointing that out mr. obvious. :-)
Gigaplex - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
These are single GPU tests. Threadripper has enough PCIe lanes to do large multi GPU systems. More GPU usually trumps better CPU in the high end gaming scene, especially with 4k resolution.BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Yes, but multi-GPU setups are generally not used for gaming-centric operations. There's been tacit acknowledgement of this as the state of things by NV since the release of the 10x0 series. Features like Crossfire and SLI support are barely a bullet point in marketing materials these days. With good reason since game support is waning as well and DX12 is positioned to pretty nail the multi-GPU coffin shut entirely except in corner cases where it MIGHT be possible to leverage an iGPU alongside a dGPU if a game engine developer bothers to invest time into banging out code to support it. That places TR's generous PCIe lane count and the potential multi-GPU usage in the domain of professional workloads that need GPU compute power.Bullwinkle J Moose - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
I agree with ddriverWe should not have to fiddle with the settings and reboot to game mode on these things
Windows should handle the hardware seamlessly in the background for whatever end use we put these systems to
The problem is getting Microsoft to let the end users use the full potential of our hardware
If the framework for the hardware is not fully implemented in the O.S., every "FIX" looks a bit like the one AMD is using here
I think gaming on anything over 4 cores might require a "proper" update from Microsoft working with the hardware manufacturers
Sometimes it might be nice to use the full potential of the systems we have instead of Microsoft deciding that all of our problems can be fixed with another cloud service
Gothmoth - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
but but.. what about linux.i mean linux is the savior, not?
it has not won a 2.2% marketshare on teh desktop for nothing.
sarcasm off....
HomeworldFound - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
What can we expect Microsoft to do prior to a product like this launching. If a processor operates in a manner that requires the operating system to be adjusted, the company selling it needs to approach Microsoft and provide an implementation, and it should be ready for launch. If that isn't possible then why manufacture something that doesn't work correctly and requires hacky fixes to run.