Project CARS, Rise of the Tomb Raider, The Division
Project CARS
Project CARS clearly responds most readily to high clock rates and IPC throughput, as evidenced by the difference between Intel's Core i5-7600K at stock and overclocked settings. Incidentally, those two configurations land in first and second place.
AMD's six-core Ryzen 5 1600X even manages to beat the eight-core Ryzen 7 1700 thanks to its higher frequency.
We noticed that our Core i5-7600K performed a little better here than in previous reviews. Curious if the extra speed was attributable to Microsoft's Game Mode, we toggled the feature on and off, only to determine that the frame rates were similar either way.
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rise of the Tomb Raider is also sensitive to IPC throughput and clock rate, which is why the Core i5s fare so well. Overclocking Core i5-7600K to 5 GHz only adds to Intel's dominance in this title.
Overclocking does help Ryzen 5 1600X quite a bit, too. Meanwhile, there's little benefit to disabling SMT. In fact, doing so causes a lot of ugly frame time spikes.
The Division
Tom Clancy's The Division has AMD's overclocked Ryzen 5 1600X going head to head against Intel's Core i5-7600K at 5 GHz. Impressive, right?
This game also serves as a cautionary tale against disabling SMT. The frame time spikes are horrible. To better illustrate, we break frame time into two charts: one with SMT on and another with SMT off. We left Ryzen 7 1700 in the second chart to show that it also experiences severe spikes that rival the FX-8370's poor performance in some cases.
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