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Shadow of Mordor & Project CARS
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
The value of an unlocked multiplier becomes clear during this benchmark. AMD's stock Ryzen processors land at the bottom of our chart. However, overclocking them adds enough performance to challenge Intel's Core CPUs.
As expected, the Core i5-7600K leads in this older game. But the overclocked Ryzen 5 1600X isn't far behind. A tuned Ryzen 5 1600 lags behind the 1600X by a mere 1.2 FPS on average. We suspect there'd be little difference between them at 4 GHz, in the event your sample is more flexible than ours. The overclocked quad-core 1500X offers nearly the same performance level, too. A stock Ryzen 5 1500X beats the 1600 during this lightly-threaded benchmark by virtue of its 200 MHz XFR advantage.
At the end of the day, all of these processors facilitate a smooth experience in Middle-earth, and their performance is quite similar.
Project CARS
Project CARS responds most readily to high clock rates and IPC throughput. The overclocked Core i5-7600K offers the highest average FPS, but a few frame time outliers crop up during the benchmark. Intel's Core i5-7500 also experiences a few spikes that show up on our chart.
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