The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTRise of the Tomb Raider
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: Geothermal Valley (1-Valley), Prophet’s Tomb (2-Prophet) and Spine of the Mountain (3-Mountain) - and we test all three. 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.
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MDD1963 - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
The Gskill 32 GB kit (2 x 16 GB/3200 MHz) I bought 13 months ago for $205 is now $400-ish...andychow - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Ridiculous comment. 7 years ago I bought 4x8 GB of RAM for $110. That same kit, from the same company, seven years later, now sells for $300. 4x16GB kits are around $800. Memory prices aren't at all the way they've always been. There is clear collusion going on. Micron and SK Hynix have both seen their stock price increase 400% in the last two years. 400%!!!!!The price of RAM just keeps increasing and increasing, and the 3 manufacturers are in no hurry to increase supply. They are even responsible for the lack of GPUs, because they are the bottleneck.
spdragoo - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
You mean a price history like this?https://camelcamelcamel.com/Corsair-Vengeance-4x8G...
Or perhaps, as mentioned here (https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/what-ha... how the previous-generation RAM tends to go up in price once the manufacturers switch to the next-gen?
Since I KNOW you're not going to claim that you bought DDR4 RAM 7 YEARS AGO (when it barely came out 4 years ago)...
Alexvrb - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
I love how you ignored everyone that already smushed your talking points to focus on a post which was likely just poorly worded.RAM prices have traditionally gone DOWN over time for the same capacity, as density improves. But recently the limited supply has completely blown up the normal price-per-capacity-over-time curve. Profit margins are massive. Saying this is "the same as always" is beyond comprehension. If it wasn't for your reply I would have sworn you were simply trolling.
Anyway this is what a lack of genuine competition looks like. NAND market isn't nearly as bad but there's supply problems there too.
vext - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
True. When prices double with no explanation, there must be collusion.The same thing has happened with videocards. I have great doubts about bitcoin mining as a driver for those price increases. If mining was so profitable, you would think there would be a mad scramble to design cards specifically for mining. Instead the load falls on the DYI consumer.
Something very odd is happening.
Alexvrb - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
They DO design things specifically for mining. It's called an ASIC miner. Unfortunately for us, some currencies are ASIC-resistant, and in some cases they can potentially change the algorithm, which makes such (expensive!) development challenging.Samus - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Yep. I went with 16GB in 2013-2014 just because I was like meh what difference does $50-$60 make when building a $1000+ PC. These days I do a double take when choosing between 8GB and 16GB for PC's I build. Even hardcore gaming PC's don't *NEED* more than 8GB, so it's worth saving $100+Memory prices have nearly doubled in the last 5 years. Sure there is cheap ram, there always has been. But a kit of quality Gskill costs twice as much as a comparable kit of quality Gskill cost in 2012.
FireSnake - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Awesome, as always. Happy reading! :)Chris113q - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Your gaming benchmarks results are garbage and every other reviewer got different results than you did. I hope no one takes this review seriously as the data is simply incorrect and misleading.Ian Cutress - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Always glad to see you offer links to show the differences.We ran our tests on a fresh version of RS3 + April Security Updates + Meltdown/Spectre patches using our standard testing implementation.