AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X Game Mode, Benchmarked

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By Paul Alcorn
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Far Cry Primal, Rise of the Tomb Raider & The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Far Cry Primal

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Far Cry Primal will not load when it detects more than 20 threads, so you have to flip the "Legacy" toggle and reboot to reduce the number of threads active on Threadripper. Disabling SMT also reduces the thread count, so you can play the game using our Local/SMT Off configuration.

This game's Dunia Engine 2 tends to perform better with SMT disabled anyway, so it's surprising to see AMD's Game mode take the lead.

Interestingly, Core i9-7900X offers the best average frame rate, but suffers some frame time disturbance at the beginning and end of our benchmark, while Threadripper provides a smooth experience in both configurations. The overclocked Threadripper Game mode configuration also offers the best 99th percentile measurement.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

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Rise of the Tomb Raider was once a less-than-ideal showcase of Ryzen's capabilities. But a recent patch fixed most of the CPU family's issues.

Creator mode trails at stock settings, but takes the lead among AMD's Threadripper processors after some overclocking. An overclocked -7900X can push to 150 FPS in this title, so a graphics bottleneck isn't the easy answer. There is almost no variation between the leading Threadripper configurations, indicating that some other limitation is affecting our results. In either case, the overclocked Threadripper's 99th percentile measurements are within range of the -7900X, and the processors do not suffer any significant hitching or stuttering.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

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A graphics bottleneck looms during the Witcher 3: Wild Hunt benchmark, but it also allows us to examine performance during a heavy scene transition at the beginning of our jog through the woods. Both Game and Creator modes stutter noticeably during this sequence, while the Local/SMT configuration doesn't stutter as badly. The Local/SMT Off setting also experiences some variance toward the test's end.


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AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
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Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.

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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