Hitman, Shadow of Mordor & Project CARS
Hitman (2016)
The Local/SMT on/off configurations offer similar performance at stock clock rates. But the delta between them widens in favor of Local/SMT Off after we do a bit of overclocking.
Intel's Core i9-7900X offers the best performance, but it also causes the most frame time variance during our benchmark. This seems attributable to blips as scenes change in the test sequence. To its credit, the -7900X provides the best 99th percentile frame rate results.
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor
Shadow of Mordor becomes more graphics-bound as we drop in higher-end CPUs, so there is little variation between most of today's contenders. The exception is Threadripper in Creator mode, which struggles with older, lightly-threaded titles. Game mode predictably fares well during the test, though it's roughly equivalent to our Local/SMT configuration.
Project CARS
The Madness game engine was designed to facilitate parallelization, but it doesn't respond well to Creator mode. This performance disparity is likely due to the distributed memory access; most games just aren't accustomed to this type of architecture.
There goes our theory that Creator mode offers the best performance in well-threaded games. Once again, the Local/SMT off combination lands in the middle of our chart, while Local/SMT switches on all 32 threads to secure a victory.
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