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
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4K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
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Lieutenant Tofu - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
"... we get an interesting metric where the 1950X still comes out on top due to the core counts, but because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores. "Would you mind elaborating on this? How does the proportion of cores per CCX affect performance?
JasonMZW20 - Sunday, August 20, 2017 - link
The only thing I can think of is CCX cache locality. Given a choice, you want more cores per CCX to keep data on that CCX rather than using cross-communication between CCXes through L2/L3. Once you have to communicate with the other CCX, you automatically incur a higher average latency penalty, which in some cases, is also a performance penalty (esp. if data keeps moving between the two CCXes).Lieutenant Tofu - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
On the compile test (prev page):"... we get an interesting metric where the 1950X still comes out on top due to the core counts, but because the 1920X has fewer cores per CCX, it actually falls behind the 1950X in Game Mode and the 1800X despite having more cores. "
Would you mind elaborating on this? How does the proportion of cores per CCX affect performance?
rhoades-brown - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
This gaming mode intrigues me greatly- the article states that the PCIe lanes and memory controller is still enabled, but the cores are turned off as shown in this diagram:http://images.anandtech.com/doci/11697/kevin_lensi...
If these are two complete processors on one package (as the diagrams and photos show), what impact does having gaming mode enabled and a PCIe device connected to the PCIe controller on the 'inactive' side? The NUMA memory latency seems to be about 1.35 surely this must affect the PCIe devices too- further how much bandwidth is there between the two processors? Opteron processors use HyperTransport for communication, do these do the same?
I work in the server world and am used to NUMA systems- for two separate processor packages in a 2 socket system, cross-node memory access times is normally 1.6x that of local memory access. For ESXi hosts, we also have particular PCIe slots that we place hardware in, to ensure that the different controllers are spread between PCIe controllers ensuring the highest level of availability due to hardware issue and peek performance (we are talking HBAs, Ethernet adapters, CNAs here). Although, hardware reliability is not a problem in the same way in a Threadripper environment, performance could well be.
I am intrigued to understand how this works in practice. I am considering building one of these systems out for my own home server environment- I yet to see any virtualisation benchmarks.
versesuvius - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
So, what is a "Game"? Uses DirectX? Makes people act stupidly? Is not capable of using what there is? Makes available hardware a hindrance to smooth computing? Looks like a lot of other apps (that are not "Game") can benefit from this "Gaming Mode".msroadkill612 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
A shame no Vega GPU in the mix :(It may have revealed interesting synergies between sibling ryzen & vega processors as a bonus.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
The only interesting synergy you'd get from a Threadripper + Vega setup is an absurdly high electrical demand and an angry power supply. Nothing makes less sense than throwing a 180W CPU plus a 295W GPU at a job that can be done with a 95W CPU and a 180W GPU just as well in all but a few many-threaded workloads (nevermind the cost savings on the CPU for buying Ryzen 7 or a Core i7).versesuvius - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
I am not sure if I am getting it right, but apparently if the L3 cache on the first Zen core is full and the core has to go to the second core's L3 cache there is an increase in latency. But if the second core is power gated and does not take any calls, then the increase in latency is reduced. Is it logical to say that the first core has to clear it with the second core before it accesses the second core's cache and if the second core is out it does not have to and that checking with the second core does not take place and so latency is reduced? Moving on if the data is not in the second core's cache then the first core has to go to DRAM accessing which supposedly does not need clearance from the second core. Or does it always need to check first with the second core and then access even the DRAM?BlackenedPies - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Would Threadripper be bottlenecked by dual channel RAM due to uneven memory access between dies? Is the optimal 2 DIMM setup one per die channel or two on one die?Fisko - Saturday, August 19, 2017 - link
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