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Web Browser
The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme. Browsers tend to be impacted more by the recent security mitigations than other types of applications, resulting in reduced performance from the Intel processors in these benchmarks. AMD's improved IPC comes into play as the 3900X takes the lead in Krakken. The stock Ryzen 7 3700X also grapples with the overclocked Core i7-9900K and i9-9900K, which is a surprising turn of events in a lightly-threaded application.
Microsoft Office
Microsoft's office suite makes its debut in our test suite via PCMark 10's new application test. This benchmark tests with real Microsoft Office applications, and we can see that the Ryzen 3000 series processors are very competitive in Excel, the Edge browser, and Word.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. The 3000-series processors occupy the middle of the ranks, but it will be interesting to revisit this benchmark with a PCIe 4.0 SSD in the future.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, which plays well to Ryzen's multi-threaded heft.
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