The AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 3700X and 3900X Raising The Bar
by Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on July 7, 2019 9:00 AM EST** = Old results marked were performed with the original BIOS & boost behaviour as published on 7/7.
Gaming: 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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| *Strange Brigade is run in DX12 and Vulkan modes | ||||||||
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.
| GTA 5 | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Maxiking - Tuesday, July 23, 2019 - link
I said a few times... I don't tend to buy amd products so no, I am not gonna sue anybody.And as pointed out in the video, in his German one, he works for a retailer selling prebuilt pcs.. People keep returning pcs with AMD cpus becaue they do not boost to the promised frequency. You there, there are something like laws, if you write on the box 4.6ghz, it must reach it.
You are so knowledgeable, sharp minded and analytical when comes to meaning of words and what people want to say, you should sue Intel on your own, should be easy.
Atom2 - Monday, July 29, 2019 - link
ICC compiler is 3x faster than LLVM and AVX512 is 2x faster than AVX2. And both were left out of comparison? The comparison designed purely only for the LLVM compiler users? Used by who?Rudde - Saturday, August 10, 2019 - link
ICC is proprietary afaik and Anandtech prefers open compilers. AVX512 should be found in 3DPM and shows utter demolition by the only processor that supports it (7920X).MasterE - Wednesday, August 7, 2019 - link
I considered going with the Ryzen 9 3900X chip and an x570 motherboard for a new rendering system but since these chips aren't available for less than $820+ anywhere, I guess I'll be back to either the threadripper or Intel 9000+ series. There is simply no way I'm paying that kind of price for a chip with a Manufacters Suggested Retail Price of $499.gglaw - Friday, August 23, 2019 - link
@Andrei - I was just digging through reviews again before biting the bullet on a 3900X and one of the big questions that is not agreed upon in the tech community is gaming performance for PBO vs all-core overclock, yet you only run 2 benches on the overclocked settings. How can a review be complete with only 2 benches run, neither related to gaming? In a PURELY single threaded scenario PBO gives a tiny 2.X percent increase in single threaded Cinebench. This indicates to me that it is not sustaining the max 4.6 on a single core or it would have scaled better, so it may not be really comparing 4.6 vs 4.3 even for single threaded performance. Almost all recent game engines can at least utilize 4 threads, so I feel your exact same test run through the gaming suite would have shown a consistent winner with 4.3 all-core OC vs PBO. And in heavily threaded scenarios the gap would keep growing larger, but specifically in today's GAMES, especially if you consider very few of us have 0 background activity, all-core OC would hands-down win is my guess, but we could have better evidence of this if you could run a complete benchmarking suite. (unless I'm blind and missed it, in case my apologies :)I've been messing around with a 3700X, and even with a 14cm Noctua cooling it, it does not sustain max allowed boost on even a single core with PBO which is another thing I wish you touched on more. During your testing do you monitor the boost speeds and what percent of the time it can stay at the max boost over XX minutes?
Maxiking - Monday, August 26, 2019 - link
Veni, vidi viciYeah, I was right.
I would like to thank my family for all the support I have received whilst fighting amd fanboys.
It was difficult, sometimes I was seriously thinking about giving up but the truth can not be stopped!
The AMD fraud has been confirmed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/cusn2t/...
Ninjawithagun - Thursday, October 10, 2019 - link
Now all you have to do is have all these benchmarks ran again after applying the 1.0.0.3. ABBA BIOS update ;-)quadibloc - Tuesday, November 12, 2019 - link
I am confused by the diagram of the current used by individual cores as the number of threads is increased. Since SMT doesn't double the performance of a core, on the 3900X, for example, shouldn't the number of cores in use increase to all 12 for the first 12 threads, one core for each thread, with all cores then remaining in use as the number of threads continues to increase to 24?Or is it just that this chart represents power consumption under a particular setting that minimizes the number of cores in use, and other settings that maximize performance are also possible?
SjLeonardo - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
Core and uncore get supplied by different VRMs, right?Parkab0y - Sunday, October 4, 2020 - link
I really want to see something like this about zen3 5000