AMD Ryzen 7 1800X review: what's the real story with gaming?
We're late with our Ryzen 7 review for a number of reasons, and some might argue that the key story has already been told. We can confirm that the top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X does indeed match and occasionally even exceed Intel's mighty Core i7 6900K octo-core/16-thread monster on a great many benchmarks and heavily multi-threaded workloads. By this measure alone, AMD's return to a competitive footing in the x86 processor market is a remarkable achievement. But equally, our own tests confirm less impressive results posted by many: Ryzen 7's gaming performance does not match up to Intel's on most titles. The question is - why?
One aspect we have to take into account is that the AM4 Summit Ridge platform is in its earliest days. We used two boards during our testing, an MSI X370 XPower Gaming Titanium and an Asus ROG Crosshair 6 Hero - both supplied by AMD - but try as we might, the supplied Corsair 3000MHz DDR4 modules in our press package would not work at anything like their stated frequencies. AMD suggested loosened latency timings and lower bandwidth, but we still couldn't get it to work as it should (despite other reviewers with the same kit getting better results).
Our review would concentrate on gaming performance and as all of our recent CPU reviews have revealed, in-game frame-rates have a close relationship with clock-speed and memory frequency. Things are improving though - GSkill provided new Flare X-branded modules that feature low C14 latency and 3200MHz speed. On our MSI board, equipped with a fresh BIOS, everything just worked - 'A-XMP' set-up almost everything to spec, though DRAM voltage needed to be manually set.
Game on! Or rather... not. There's the sense that despite its lengthy gestation period, Ryzen isn't fully integrated with Windows yet, meaning that AMD wants us to make a number of changes for best performance. Dipping into the Windows 10 power profile, AMD recommends changing the setting from the standard balanced to high performance mode. The Windows high precision event timer needs to be disabled to add a few points to the performance scale. There are other tips AMD proffers, designed to push Ryzen performance higher in gaming scenarios, and we'll discuss those in due course.
Rich's extended video review of the Ryzen 7 1800X. So just what is going on with Ryzen's gaming performance?
- Buy the Ryzen 7 1800X[?] from Amazon with free shipping.
Once set-up though, it's clear that Ryzen does indeed meet the hype in many respects, particularly with its multi-threading capabilities. The results across the web demonstrating this are legion, but just to cover the bases, below you'll find our Cinebench R15 results along with h.264 and HEVC Handbrake encoding tests, based on transcoding one of our demanding 4K videos. Ryzen is faster than the 6900K on h.264, but the Intel chip takes point with intense HEVC encoding. HEVC has more of a focus on AVX2 instructions - an area where AMD has an architectural disadvantage. Regardless, the Intel eight-core chip is only 11 per cent ahead. Scalability with HEVC seems to need some work though - the i7 7700K isn't so far behind. That particular i7 may lack cores, but its frequency is higher, which still seems to count for a lot.
But it's the gaming side of things where Ryzen has provoked the most controversy. In terms of single-thread and multi-thread performance, Cinebench tests - and many others - confirm that Ryzen 7 1800X is competitive with a chip Intel sells that costs twice as much, while Ryzen 7 1700X and stand a good chance of overclocking to something close to 1800X performance. With such fundamental validation on one set of number-crunching workloads, it stands to reason that Ryzen should perform in a similar manner on another: gaming - but it doesn't.
First up, a look at our test system and an explanation of how we benchmark CPUs. We're mostly using parts supplied by an AMD - MSI's X370 Xpower Gaming Titanium is a beautiful, top-tier motherboard, but we've swapped out the Corsair 3000MHz Vengeance LPX that we couldn't push beyond 2400MHz with GSkill's freshly minted low-latency C14 3200MHz Ryzen-validated modules. XMP isn't supported natively by AMD (it's an Intel format), which may have led to some of our compatibility issues, but all major manufacturers have their own emulation of the system. In the case of the MSI board, it instantly locked onto the correct timings and frequency for the GSkill modules, but the latest BIOS is required for this level of 'plug and play' compatibility. AMD also supplied an EK Predator 240 closed-loop watercooler - a monstrous piece of kit.
We believe that a CPU purchase should last for years, so rather than test processors with a particular GPU at standard gaming conditions, we opt instead to take the graphics hardware out of the test results as best we can and to attempt to concentrate more closely on a processor's gaming potential. The aim here is to ascertain relative performance between CPUs when running game engine code - this gives a better idea of how 'lastable' a potential processor may be. Check out this Kaby Lake CPU performance comparison, for example. It illustrates how much extra frame-rate you get from a CPU relative to the price you pay for it.
To produce these results, we run a game at ultra settings or equivalent at 1080p resolution when paired with an overclocked Titan X Pascal. This ensures that the CPU is tested at its peak doing the jobs it is intended for - processing game logic, calculating animation and physics, as well as one of its most crucial tasks: preparing instructions for the GPU. It's fair to say that Ryzen is competitive in some titles here, but falls short in others. The raw numbers can be sobering though: the top-tier Ryzen is beaten by the i5 7600K in four out of seven titles, and it's significantly off the pace set by the i7s in games like Rise of the Tomb Raider DX12, The Witcher 3 and Ashes of the Singularity's brutal CPU benchmark.
Far Cry Primal is a game that is multi-core aware, but is powered by a dominant single thread. Here we see the more slowly clocked eight-core chips on Intel's older architectures easily beaten by both Kaby Lake processors, but Ryzen is also significantly behind. Crysis 3 remains one of the best multithreaded gaming workouts and acquits itself well with the 1800X (more so than the numbers suggest, as we shall discover) but the disappointing Tomb Raider result is strange: this game scales up adequately on the Intel eight-core processors - something of a rarity - but Ryzen disappoints. The frame-rate result is sub-par even compared to a stock 7600K, but we should stress that a look at frame-times shows less microstutter, a similar situation to an i7. Tomb Raider really does like threads - and lots of them.
Looking at the Crysis 3 test in more detail, the i7 7700K inches to victory over Ryzen, but the nature of the test result is a touch questionable. In detail-intensive, rich scenes, Ryzen pushes ahead. When the visuals are far less complex, the i7 7700K pulls way, way into the lead. Given the choice we would prefer a processor that handles the bottom end better - and in this case, that's Ryzen. However, based on our sample at least, this is an outlier. As things stand, the 7700K looks like the better bet. AMD's response to Ryzen's sub-par 1080p showing is to encourage reviewers and users to test at higher resolutions, where the processor's fortunes are healthier. We weren't so sure that this was a fair test - our initial thought is that this simply brings CPU scores more closely into line by adding the GPU as an artificial limiting factor. Well, that is indeed the case, but this is a new platform with its own strengths and weaknesses, and there's no harm in testing.
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