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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Korguz - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
huh ???mkozakewich - Saturday, July 13, 2019 - link
"...as unfortunately the timing didn’t work out."You should increase his voltage a little and reboot, that might help.
Meteor2 - Monday, July 15, 2019 - link
It's hard to get one's head around this, but basically: *all* the Intel benchmarks *do not* include the security patches for the MDS-class flaws. The 9000 and 8000 series tests do include the OS-side Spectre fixes, but that's it. No OS-fixes for other CPUs, and no motherboard firmware fixes for any Intel CPUsAt the very least, all the Intel CPUs should be retested on Windows 10 1903 which has the OS-side MDS fixes.
Most if not all the motherboards used for the Intel reviews can also have their firmware upgraded to fix Spectre and most times MDS flaws. Do it.
This is sensible and reasonable to do: no sensible and reasonable user would leave their OS vulnerable. Maybe the motherboard, because it's a bit scary to do, but as that can be patched, it should be by reviewers.
This would result in all the Intel scores being lower. We don't know by how much without this process actually being done. But until it is, the Intel results, and thus the review itself, are invalid.
While you're at it Anandtech, each year buy the latest $999 GPU for CPU testing. Consider it a cost of doing business. Letting the GPU bottleneck the CPU on most game resolutions benchmarked is pointless.
plonk420 - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
mountain time zone, best time zone... 7am 7/7!exactopposite - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Been waiting on this one for a long timeEris_Floralia - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
It's really nice to see Andrei starting to take part in desktop processor reviews and Gavin Bonshor's hardwork!mjz_5 - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
Intel gets 5% better FPS In games is really not a win. I’ll consider that a tie. In multiple applications AMD gets 20% more performance. That’s a win!!Dragonstongue - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
hopefully Anal lists :P see how much a "win" the Ryzen 3k / x5xx / Navi truly are, not only to get AMD margins even higher but to take more market share from Intel and "stagnate" Nvidia's needing to "up the price" to make more $$$$$$ when AMD "seems" to be making "as much if not more" selling a small amount less per unit (keep in mind, AMD is next Playstation and Xbox which are 99/9% likely to be using the same silicon, so, AMD take a "small hit" to get as many Ryzen gen 3 and Navi "in the world" which drums up market/mindshare which is extremely important for any business, at this stage in the game is VITAL for AMD.sor - Sunday, July 7, 2019 - link
I’m honestly wondering what the point is of the gaming benchmarks for CPU tests anymore.It seems like the game is either so easy to render that we are comparing values in the hundreds of FPS, or they’re so hard to render that it’s completely GPU dependent and the graph is flat for all CPUs.
In the vast majority of tests here one would have an identical experience with any of the top four CPUs tested.
Targon - Monday, July 8, 2019 - link
Game engines are starting to use more cores, and at lower resolutions(which do not stress the video card all that much) will show improvements/benefits of using one CPU or even platform over another. In this review, due to the RAM being used, the gaming benchmarks are almost invalid(DDR4-3200 CL16), since moving to CL14 RAM would potentially eliminate any advantage Intel has in these benchmarks.