The AMD Threadripper 2 CPU Review: The 24-Core 2970WX and 12-Core 2920X Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 29, 2018 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Grand Theft Auto V
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.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Open World | Apr 2015 |
DX11 | 720p Low |
1080p High |
1440p Very High |
4K Ultra |
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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).
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Game | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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peevee - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
You don't have real workstation tests except for Chromium compile, and even that is apparently broken (for example, no /Gm on the projects or something like that).Schmich - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Your ads are one of the worst of tech blogs. Distracting ads with moving items. Dynamic resizing of the slow loading header ads, so by the time you want to click on something you've clicked on something else. Autoplaying videos that follow you down as you read the article. No wonder people install adblock but strangely blogs call the readers a problem.peevee - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Somebody reading anandtech who does not use adblocking?I am genuineley shocked.
And it's not a blog.
firestream - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Can someone test the those in-memory business application like Qlikview? It should be very interesting whether TR2 can replace the developer machine who are crunching large amount of dataset to build dashboard or analytic.crotach - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Damn, this i9-9900k is a beast! It even looks like good value for money when compared like this.SanX - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
What the problem with AMD AVX or test's AVX?GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
AMD's AVX units are limited due to the Zen architecture. Basically, they cut stuff down into 128-bit chunks but only certain modules can do certain things. AVX2 requires work over two instructions. And it can't do AVX-512 yet. This might well have been the appropriate decision - after all, wider units means more to go wrong, and more power. But it limits performance on AVX workloads.Henk Poley - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
I wonder when they'll include a few high performance cores for single core heavy tasks. Kinda ridiculous that an iPad Pro / iPhone XR can get +33 to +50% better performance on Speedometer 2.0Henk Poley - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
It could be cool to throw in a 4-core Intel Core i7-7740X, which appears to be fairly efficient in multicore performance. I wouldn't be surprised if it held up decently at the bottom spot, but using much less cores.