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AotS: Escalation & Battlefield 1
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
Ashes of the Singularity was one of the first games to receive a Ryzen-specific patch, so it illustrates what can happen when a developer spends time optimizing for the Zen architecture's intricacies. We recorded impressive performance boosts after the update.
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation scales exceedingly well with more cores/threads, rewarding the six-core Ryzen processors in both stock and overclocked configurations. Intel's Core i5-7600K has much more overclocking headroom, however, allowing it to take the pole position. In its stock configuration, the -7600K falls into the same range as the other four-core processors.
Notably, AMD's four-core Ryzen 5 1500X bests the Intel Core i5-7500, largely due to improved utilization, which is enabled by its SMT implementation.
The stock Ryzen 5 1600 experiences the most apparent frame time outliers during the test, but a bit of overclocking provides a drastic improvement.
Battlefield 1 DX12
We dialed Battlefield 1 up to the Ultra preset and took an armor-laden stroll across the O La Vittoria landscape.
The Ryzen 5 1600 bests a four-core 1500X, but trails the rest of the field. Overclocking helps propel it to similar performance as the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600X.
Battlefield 1 DX11
In Battlefield 1, under the DX11 API, Ryzen processors tend to score better relative to Intel's Core chips. Presenting benchmark results using different settings helps illustrate how even one game can paint different pictures of performance, depending on how it's set up.
The stock Ryzen 5 1600 beats Intel's Core i5-7500, and overclocking widens the gap. We notice a much larger delta between the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X (3.25%) in this test. Then again, there is a 100 MHz difference in clock rate between the two processors (2.5%). The 1600X's 3200 MT/s memory data rate is also higher than the 1600's 2966 MT/s, and given the increased performance we find with faster memory, that likely contributes to the disparity. AMD's forthcoming AGESA update might improve memory overclocking with the Ryzen 5 1600, which would help get it closer to the 1600X.
Those big blue spikes in our frame time over run chart belong to the Ryzen 5 1500X. Not good.
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