The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM 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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techguymaxc - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Either you don't have a fast enough GPU to remove the GPU bottleneck or there's something wrong with your data because there is NO chance Ryzen is faster than *lake in GTA V, with lower IPC and clocks.Don't get me wrong, Ryzen 2 looks like a good product family and I wouldn't discourage anyone from buying.
SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
As everyone else that are misreading the results. Tests are done at stock speeds and no overclocking.LurkingSince97 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Yes there is.Stock CPU and RAM speeds. Fully spectre / meltdown patched on both sides. Who is re-using old results? This review re-uses old results for the older generation Ryzen, and so some of the performance boost could be false (new drivers, OS patches, firmware, bios....).
More investigation is needed on all sides. Many other review sites are significantly more lazy than AT and are likely recycling old results for the Intel side.
As for your GPU bottleneck.... um no. Look at the results, as the resolution goes up, THEN you get GPU bottlenecked and all CPUs look the same. At low resolutions, it is clearly not GPU bottlenecked as there is a big FPS difference by CPU.
jaydee - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Great review. Curious to see how things scale down for a 35W TDP part compared to Intel's latest 35W TDP CPUs.SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Gamers Nexus have tested the 2700X to work at 1.175V locked to 4.1GHz where it consumes 129W compared to stock frequency and stock voltage where it consumes 200W. Performance is generally the same on average.Flunk - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Wow, that single-thread performance delta sure has shrunk hasn't it? Between meltdown and higher core clocks on the Zen+.mapesdhs - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
Wonder whether it won't be that much longer until AMD launches something which actually beats Intel in IPC. Atm, people keep saying Intel wins on IPC, but it's only because Intel has punched its clock rates through the roof (it's like the old P4 days again), something they could have done years ago but never bothered because there was no competition, just as they could have released a consumer 8-core long ago but didn't (the 3930K was a crippled 8-core, but back then AMD couldn't even beat mainstream SB, never mind SB-E).mkaibear - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
You know IPC is "instructions per clock", yeah? So saying Intel wins on IPC because their clock rate is faster doesn't make sense, it's like saying UK cars have a higher mpg then US cars because their gallons are bigger.Intel wins (won?) on IPC because they executed more instructions per MHz of the clock rate. When you couple that with a faster clock rate you get a double whammy of performance. It does appear that AMD has almost closed the door on IPC but is still not operating on as high a clock rate.
Targon - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
This is why many are looking forward to Zen 2 in 2019, which will have true design improvements compared to Zen and Zen+. Zen+ is a small and incremental improvement over Zen(first generation Ryzen chips). Combined with 7nm, we may very well see AMD get very close to Intel clock speeds while having very similar, if not better IPC and a higher core count.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Looks like a good review. Glad to see AMD closing the performance gap even further!