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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Ian Cutress - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I moved it to $979 because that's the price of the upcoming 10980XE, which hasn't been released but has some extra frequency, so it should score 'at least' there.platinumjsi - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
The Geekbench multicore results look very low for the 9980XE, Hot Hardware and OC3D's reviews of that chip put it at around 43k and the Geekbench browser puts non overclockable workstations at around 55k.Was multicore enhancement off for Intel and PBO on for AMD?
blppt - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
If I had to guess, it looks like maybe they have turbo completely disabled on both the 9980XE and the 7980XE, meaning in the case of the 7980XE, it will never clock higher than 2.6ghz. Or maybe they included scores for the 32-bit test for those two by mistake?See my post below---I regularly get 52-53K in that benchmark, no overclocking and no high clock ram.
blppt - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Something is really wrong with your 7980XE setup---getting 30K in Geekbench 4???Granted I have the multi-core enhancement enabled in the BIOS, but I get 52-53K consistently, no overclocking. Using standard 2600 DDR4.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/14797740
Count Rushmore - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Hmm... seem like for rendering machine, Threadripper is the way to go. I thought I could build 'cheap' rendering machines with 3950... but that 2 memory channels seem inadequate. Looking fwd to 25th!Oliseo - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
I would say the dual memory channel makes it a "prosumer" choice rather than a professional.Amazing value though for someone just starting out their career. That level of performance at home without breaking the bank.
Not bad at all.
Count Rushmore - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
No doubt about the value... Would love to see more people getting into 3D renderingicoreaudience - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
When is anandtech going to use a modern compressor like Zstandard for the encoding test ?It's a great fit for multi-threading tests !
itproflorida - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Great so the 9700k is still the price, performance gaming king.eek2121 - Thursday, November 14, 2019 - link
Ian, upgrade 1080. Your gaming benchmarks are very clearly GPU bound at this point.