AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Game Mode, Benchmarked

By published

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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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
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Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn

Paul Alcorn is the Deputy Managing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage and enterprise hardware.
25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • beshonk
    "extra cores could enable more performance in the future as software evolves to utilize them better"

    I can't believe we're still saying this in 2017. Developers suck at their job.
    Reply
  • sztepa82
    "AMD aims Threadripper at content creators, heavy multitaskers, and gamers who stream simultaneously. It also says the processors are ideal for gaming at high resolutions. Ryzen Threadripper 1950X isn't intended for playing around at low resolutions, particularly in older, lightly-threaded titles. ____Still, we tested at 1920x1080____ ...."

    Thank you for being out there for us, Tom's, no other website has ever done that. The only other thing we can hope for is that you'll also do a 2S Epyc 7601 review playing Project Cars in 320x240.
    Reply
  • shrapnel_indie
    Each change requires a reboot, chewing up precious time as you save open projects, halt conversations, and try to remember which web browser tabs to relaunch.

    not if you're running the right browser with the right options active. Firefox can remember the last tabs you had open and reopen them upon startup... of course this is within the last Firefox window closed, and you have to properly exit. (no killing the thread(s).)
    Reply
  • soulg1969
    When I go to pause the video (ad) your site takes me to another tab. Bye, bye.
    Reply
  • -Fran-
    Since this CPU (and Intel's X and XE line) are aimed for big spenders, when are you guys going to test multi GPU in these CPUs?

    Also, you mentioned streaming as part of the big CPU charisma, but there was no actual test with it. Why not just run OBS with the same software encoding settings for each platform and run a game? It's not that hard to do, is it?

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • Dyseman
    Quote- 'When I go to pause the video (ad) your site takes me to another tab. Bye, bye.'

    It's easy enough to disable the JW Player with ublock. Those videos are not considered ads but adblockers, but you can tell it to block anything that uses JW Player, then whitelist any other site that needs to use it for NON-ADs.
    Reply
  • rhysiam
    Thanks for this investigation Toms, really thorough and interesting article.

    It's interesting and a little disappointing that an OC to 3.9Ghz seems to pretty consistently achieve a small but measurable bump in gaming. The 1950X can use XFR to get to 4.2Ghz on lightly threaded workloads. Obviously in well-threaded games the CPU isn't going to be able to sustain 4.2Ghz, but it's a bit disappointing it can't manage 3.9-4ghz across the 4-6 cores used in gaming workloads. In fact, judging from the results it seems to be sitting around 3.7-3.8Ghz or so in most games. That seems low to me. There should be plenty of thermal and power headroom available to to get 4-6 cores up to nice high clocks, which should be enough cores for pretty much every game in the suite (except perhaps AOTS). If that was happening we'd see the OC making no difference, or even perhaps causing a slight performance regression in games (like it does in synthetic single-threaded tests). But clearly that's not the case.

    It seems to me that AMD's power management implementation is resulting in some pretty conservative clock speeds in the 4-6 core workload range. That has implications outside of gaming as well, because 4-6 thread workloads are quite common even in the productivity and content creation space. It's hardly a deal breaker (we're only looking a couple of hundred mhz), but I'm curious whether others think AMD is giving up a little more performance than they should be here? Or am I missing something?
    Reply
  • jdwii
    20187640 said:
    Thanks for this investigation Toms, really thorough and interesting article.

    It's interesting and a little disappointing that an OC to 3.9Ghz seems to pretty consistently achieve a small but measurable bump in gaming. The 1950X can use XFR to get to 4.2Ghz on lightly threaded workloads. Obviously in well-threaded games the CPU isn't going to be able to sustain 4.2Ghz, but it's a bit disappointing it can't manage 3.9-4ghz across the 4-6 cores used in gaming workloads. In fact, judging from the results it seems to be sitting around 3.7-3.8Ghz or so in most games. That seems low to me. There should be plenty of thermal and power headroom available to to get 4-6 cores up to nice high clocks, which should be enough cores for pretty much every game in the suite (except perhaps AOTS). If that was happening we'd see the OC making no difference, or even perhaps causing a slight performance regression in games (like it does in synthetic single-threaded tests). But clearly that's not the case.

    It seems to me that AMD's power management implementation is resulting in some pretty conservative clock speeds in the 4-6 core workload range. That has implications outside of gaming as well, because 4-6 thread workloads are quite common even in the productivity and content creation space. It's hardly a deal breaker (we're only looking a couple of hundred mhz), but I'm curious whether others think AMD is giving up a little more performance than they should be here? Or am I missing something?

    Ryzen hits a certain point in return pretty darn fast for example CPU might only use 1.15V to get 3.6ghz stable but 3.9ghz needs like 1.3V way to much.
    Reply
  • papality
    20185985 said:
    "extra cores could enable more performance in the future as software evolves to utilize them better"

    I can't believe we're still saying this in 2017. Developers suck at their job.

    Intel's billions had a lot to say in this.
    Reply
  • tacobravo
    You need to label your graphs
    Reply