The AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Review: 16 Cores on 7nm with PCIe 4.0
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 14, 2019 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.
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.
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rret - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
we have nearly 400 million dollars - you give us gold award and then we release the money to you. my lawyer will call you...either that or my attorney general. stay close to phone!Kishoreshack - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
That's a good thingI hope we scrap out gold awards in all together
Only recommended is what matters
soo we know all Anandtech recommendations carry same weight
Hope to see you implement this
Oliseo - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
No brown envelope at the usual deadrop.Irata - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Just curious: Were the Intel systems fully patched, including the new JCC Microcode update ?ydeer - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Excellent question.Ian Cutress - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Did I run 30hr+ of tests on each of those Intel processors with a patch from an announcement 24 hours prior? No, of course not.Irata - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I did not expect this to be honest. Must not be fun testing with the different security related updates from Intel or Bios patches from AMD that come out regularly.Might be worth adding a mention to the review since the JCC and Zombieload 2 updates can have a performance impact (as per Phoronix).
Irata - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Oh, and not to be rude - thank you very much for this through review Ian.Flying Aardvark - Friday, November 15, 2019 - link
Can you at notate that in the review in large bold print, and that it's likely to affect performance, possibly dramatically for the Intel CPUs?lukx - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
what where the temperatures? can you use air cooling?