The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X and 3970X Review: 24 and 32 Cores on 7nm
by Dr. Ian Cutress, Andrei Frumusanu & Gavin Bonshor on November 25, 2019 9:05 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.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
plonk420 - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
it may be small, but they're now fighting Intel in that same small market with these Threadrippers, and, well AMD has the winning product in use cases i'm looking at (simultaneous video encoding streams and Blender, with enough cores to do that while gaming).AV1 is currently so slow to encode, i have to split a movie into 8 parts (probably more with one of these Zen2 TRs to get it done quicker) for a doable encode. took about 41-48 hours per part save for the credits to encode at 720p on a 16c32t 1950X
DavyJones - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
AMD curbstomps Intel at every price point, from $50 all the way to $7000+. How much lower should AMD price their CPU's exactly? Should they give them away for free?And yes, Intel has a vastly larger marketshare. They were on top for well over a decade, & for a large portion of that, AMD was completely irrelevant. Their server marketshare was statistically insignificant just 3 years ago & now they're knocking on the door of 10%. Their stock has skyrocketed in that time. Again... How cheap should AMD go when they have an objectively superior product?
jabber - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
Indeed at the end of the day Dell and HP etc. are taking all the i3/i5 chips the Corporate market can buy.Intel are probably still outselling AMD 10 to 1?
maxxbot - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
I would absolutely bet that more of these TR3 are going to be sold to professionals than consumers, I waited in line for the 3950X yesterday and even for that part half of the people in line were buying it for work.Teckk - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
In this segment could be, but in laptops Intel is what is selling. AMD needs Zen2 + 7nm thereTEAMSWITCHER - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
That's my issue... I can't find any of these Threadripper, Ryzen 3950X, or Cascade Lake X in stock anywhere. But I can order 16" MacBook Pro right now and have it here tomorrow. Desktop CPU's are OLD SCHOOL. I would rather have a mobile solution that I can take .. anywhere.Korguz - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
must be just where you are.. i can go to one store and buy the Threadripper 3960X now, but the 3970x is special order, for the intel 10xx series, not showing anything for these, yetimaheadcase - Monday, November 25, 2019 - link
Did Csutcliff not even look at benchmarks or even look at price difference for a setup?tygrus - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
News of Intel's death have been greatly exaggerated. It would take more than 20 years of bad performance (<20% market share) for Intel to burn it's cash reserves.Oliseo - Tuesday, November 26, 2019 - link
I've seen bigger companies fail faster.