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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jjj - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I was wondering about gaming, so there is no mistake there as Ryzen 2 seems to top Intel.As of right now, I don't seem to find memory specs in the review yet, safe to assume you did as always, highest non-OC so Ryzen is using faster DRAM?
Also yet to spot memory letency, any chance you have some numbers at 3600MHz vs Intel? Thanks.
jjj - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
And just between us, would be nice to have some Vega gaming results under DX12.aliquis - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Would be nice if any reviewer actually benchmarked storage devices maybe even virtualization because then we'd see meltdown and spectre mitigation performance. Then again do AMD have any for spectre v2 yet? If not who knows what that will do.HStewart - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I notice that that systems had higher memory, but for me I believe single threaded performance is more important that more cores. But it would be bias if one platform is OC more than another. Personally I don't over clock - except for what is provided with CPU like Turbo mode.One thing that I foresee in the future is Intel coming out with 8 core Coffee Lake
But at least it appears one thing is over is this Meltdown/Spectre stuff
Lolimaster - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Intel 8 core CL won't stop the bleeding, lose more profits making them "cheap" vs a new Ryzen 7nm with at least 10% more clocks and 10% more IPC, RIP.HStewart - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I just have to agree to disagree on that statement - especially on "cheap" statementACE76 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
CL can't scale to 8 cores...not without done serious changes to it's architecture...Intel is in some trouble with this Ryzen refresh...also worth noting is that 7nm Ryzen 2 will likely bring a considerable performance jump while Intel isn't sitting on anything worthwhile at the moment.Alphasoldier - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
All Intel's 8cores in HEDT except SkylakeX are based on their year older architecture with a bigger cache and the quad channel.So if Intel have the need, they will simply make a CL 8core. 2700X is pretty hungry when OC'd, so Intel don't have to worry at all about its power consuption.
moozooh - Sunday, April 22, 2018 - link
> 2700X is pretty hungry when OC'dAnd Intel chips aren't? If Zen+ is already on Intel's heels for both performance per watt and raw frequency, a 7nm chip with improved IPC and/or cache is very likely going to have them pull ahead by a significant margin. And even if it won't, it's still going to eat into Intel's profit as their next tech is 10nm vs. AMD's 7nm, meaning more optimal wafer estate utilization for the latter.
AMD has really climbed back at the top of their game; I've been in the Intel camp for the last 12 years or so, but the recent developments throw me way back to K7 and A64 days. Almost makes me sad that I won't have any reason to move to a different mobo in the next 6–8 years or so.
mapesdhs - Friday, March 29, 2019 - link
Amusing to look back given how things panned out. So yes, Intel released the 9900K, but it was 100% more expensive than the 2700X. :D A complete joke. And meanwhile tech reviewers raved about a peasly 5 to 5.2 oc, on a chip that already has a 4.7 max turbo (major yawn fest), focusing on specific 1080p gaming tests that gave silly high fps number favoured by a market segment that is a tiny minority. Then what happens, RTX comes out and pushes the PR focus right back down to 60Hz. :DI wish people to stop drinking the Intel/NVIDIA coolaid. AMD does it aswell sometimes, but it's bizarre how uncritical tech reviewers often are about these things. The 9900K dragged mainstream CPU pricing up to HEDT levels; epic fail. Some said oh but it's great for poorly optimised apps like Premiere, completely ignoring the "poorly optimised" part (ie. why the lack of pressure to make Adobe write better code? It's weird to justify an overpriced CPU on the back of a pro app that ought to run a lot better on far cheaper products).