The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU Rendering Tests
Rendering tests are a long-time favorite of reviewers and benchmarkers, as the code used by rendering packages is usually highly optimized to squeeze every little bit of performance out. Sometimes rendering programs end up being heavily memory dependent as well - when you have that many threads flying about with a ton of data, having low latency memory can be key to everything. Here we take a few of the usual rendering packages under Windows 10, as well as a few new interesting benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: link
Corona is a standalone package designed to assist software like 3ds Max and Maya with photorealism via ray tracing. It's simple - shoot rays, get pixels. OK, it's more complicated than that, but the benchmark renders a fixed scene six times and offers results in terms of time and rays per second. The official benchmark tables list user submitted results in terms of time, however I feel rays per second is a better metric (in general, scores where higher is better seem to be easier to explain anyway). Corona likes to pile on the threads, so the results end up being very staggered based on thread count.
Blender 2.78: link
For a render that has been around for what seems like ages, Blender is still a highly popular tool. We managed to wrap up a standard workload into the February 5 nightly build of Blender and measure the time it takes to render the first frame of the scene. Being one of the bigger open source tools out there, it means both AMD and Intel work actively to help improve the codebase, for better or for worse on their own/each other's microarchitecture.
This is one multi-threaded test where the 8-core Skylake-based Intel processor wins against the new AMD Ryzen 7 2700X; the variable threaded nature of Blender means that the mesh architecture and memory bandwidth work well here. On a price/parity comparison, the Ryzen 7 2700X easily takes the win from the top performers. Users with the Core i7-6700K are being easily beaten by the Ryzen 5 2600.
LuxMark v3.1: Link
As a synthetic, LuxMark might come across as somewhat arbitrary as a renderer, given that it's mainly used to test GPUs, but it does offer both an OpenCL and a standard C++ mode. In this instance, aside from seeing the comparison in each coding mode for cores and IPC, we also get to see the difference in performance moving from a C++ based code-stack to an OpenCL one with a CPU as the main host.
POV-Ray 3.7.1b4: link
Another regular benchmark in most suites, POV-Ray is another ray-tracer but has been around for many years. It just so happens that during the run up to AMD's Ryzen launch, the code base started to get active again with developers making changes to the code and pushing out updates. Our version and benchmarking started just before that was happening, but given time we will see where the POV-Ray code ends up and adjust in due course.
Cinebench R15: link
The latest version of CineBench has also become one of those 'used everywhere' benchmarks, particularly as an indicator of single thread performance. High IPC and high frequency gives performance in ST, whereas having good scaling and many cores is where the MT test wins out.
Intel is still the single thread champion in benchmarks like CineBench, but it would appear that the Ryzen 7 2700X is now taking the lead in the multithreaded test.
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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!