Can gaming performance compete with Intel? • iGamesNews.com

The third-generation Ryzen caused a sensation, and AMD's new series of processors competed with Intel's current CPU champion in a seemingly spectacular style. AMD's basic formula remains the same-more cores, more threads, and more performance at a lower cost-but, with a series of architectural improvements and a large increase in cache size, the Red Team Trying to address Ryzen's weaknesses in single-threaded performance. At the same time, the company has turned to 7nm chip manufacturing, which means that AMD is actually better than Intel in terms of craftsmanship for the first time, which means that it is smaller, cooler and more energy efficient than Intel's competitors.

At the same time, AMD has not stalled outer chip. The Ryzen 7 3700X has a very good heat sink in the box (Intel has not done it on high-end products), and the new processor series supports PCI Express 4.0 bandwidth when paired with the new X570 chipset motherboard. The slot AM4 is still the main interface between the CPU and the motherboard. As long as you update the BIOS, most old motherboards should be able to handle new chips. AMD also received additional bonus points that allowed overclocked memory to run on mid-range and high-end motherboards, which means that even with older motherboards using the B350 chipset, the third-generation Ryzen can still provide excellent performance.

AMD has launched a full product stack for the Ryzen 3000, but unfortunately this review is a bit late due to the accumulation of GPU versions. We have both a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X and a six-core Ryzen 5 3600X, but the focus of this article is the eight-core / 16-thread Ryzen 7 3700X. The previous generation of Ryzen products failed to convince Intel products such as quad-core i7 7700K, six-core i7 8700K and Intel's own eight-core 9900K. However, the architectural improvements here should weaken some of Intel's inherent advantages.

Previous Ryzen chips used two quad-core CCXs in a single chip. The disadvantage is that the communication between the two clusters depends on the speed of the DDR4 memory. This means that excessive latency may hinder tasks between CCX, and thus rely on fast RAM in markets where performance modules are very expensive. Ryzen 3000 first solved this problem with 7nm technology-CCX now consists of only an eight-core cluster. Second, the L3 cache has actually doubled, and AMD says it can fully address latency issues.

With the new, more efficient branch predictor, the actual core design has also been improved. Better handling of AVX instructions also addresses another major weakness of Ryzen. This won't have much impact (if any) on gaming applications, but the first iteration of the Zen kernel is obviously bad for Intel here. We will see that Ryzen has improved a lot this time.

First, a quick introduction to system settings. Everything was tested on a clean Windows 10 installation, including the latest patches th at help with thread scheduling on Ryzen processors. The operating system and games are installed on 2TB Gigabit Aorus m.2 NVMe drives provided by AMD (not less than PCIe 4.0 compatible!), And the same 3600MHz CL16 Gskill Trident Z Royal memory is used on all systems (also provided by AMD ). The Ryzen 7 2700X was tested on an ASUS ROG Crosshair 8 motherboard (thanks again to AMD for using the motherboard), while the Core i7 9700K runs on the MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon.

The new Ryzen 7 3700X was tested on a board that we can manage as close as possible to the Gaming Pro Carbon, and MSI offers the X570 MPG Gaming Plus board. It costs about $ 180, which is cheaper than a high-end x570 motherboard, but the price is still high. As you would expect from this brand, this is a good motherboard: the chipset is actively cooled, provides PCIe 4.0 support, dual m.2 with RAID support, m.2 heat sink and fast RAM support up to 4400MHz . Audio is provided with the Realtek ALC1220 codec, and the company also provides on-board 811H Gigabit Ethernet support. With the 3700X, the motherboard performed well-the only problem we encountered was trying to run the GSkill 3600MHz memory with the older Ryzen 7 2700X. This resulted in a random blue screen while the ROG Crosshair 8 was working properly.

The Ryzen chips were all tested using the included Wraith Prism cooler, which is the most impressive heat sink / fan we found bundled with the CPU. All Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 processors in the lineup have received this RGB-injected beast, and some may even suggest that it is too lethal for the 65W TDP Ryzen 7 3700X. Yes, you can overclock it, but the loss in efficiency will only be obtained with slightly higher performance. AMD's Precision Boost technology is indeed impressive-single-core tasks can reach up to 4.4GHz, but with Wraith Prism, the joystick frequency range is 4.2GHz to 4.275GHz. Our Intel system uses a Corsair all-in-one liquid cooler, but it must be noted that turbocharging is disabled-in the game, the 9700K runs all cores at 4.6GHz.

Let's set up the scene with some very basic benchmarks. The new Cinebench R20 benchmark test represents only a very limited workload. Although it can hardly represent the complete system performance, many people believe that the results it produces are good "scenario setters" and Multi-threaded performance. However, from our point of view, it seems to overestimate single-core performance to a certain extent-certainly, when compared to single-core gaming throughput. That said, despite this, even if compared to the 9700K here may not fully reflect real-life performance, it will still mark progress from generation to generation. Obviously, the single-core performance has been significantly improved, and the increase in single-core performance cannot be explained by the frequency increase alone.

Video encoding is actually a lot of work. Here we use Handbrake's x264 and x265 kernels to measure the h.264 and HEVC encoding speed by setting the Production Quality preset to CRF 18. Ryzen 7 3700X proposed a command that is ahead of the Core i7 9700K. Once again, compared to the Ryzen 7 2700X, it has grown significantly from generation to generation, with an amazing 28% increase in encoding speed. However, in HEVC encoding, the situation looks particularly impressive: the 2700X is 46% faster, and AMD's traditionally weaker benchmarks show that it is ahead of Intel.

AMD's icing on the cake is power consumption. We tested the power consumption during the HEVC encoding phase-heavy power consumption work. Due to the transition to the 7nm process, the Ryzen 7 3700X is not only the highest performing processor, but also the most energy efficient. Intel clearly does a good job with 14nm processors, but the improvement from 2700X to 3700X is again surprising. On this particular task, power consumption was reduced by 38% and performance was increased by 46%.

So far, the evidence seems particularly compelling to AMD, but this is mainly a review of gaming performance, and here AMD can provide everything. The architectural improvements and the larger L3 cache are designed to reduce Ryzen's memory latency and make it better than Intel. AMD's own benchmarks show that Ryzen is now comparable to the Core i7-winning some benchmarks but losing some benchmarks, but always at the same level. Our conclusions are somewhat different-as you will see-but it is clear that AMD is closing the gap.

But to say the least, getting a meaningful gaming CPU benchmark is really a challenge, because the processor faces many different challenges based on what happens in the game, and I found that In the same game, You will find that AMD is ahead of Intel and vice versa. If you watch the video at the top of the page, you will see some practical examples that illustrate my efforts and attempts to accumulate enough data to draw conclusions. This data is represented as a bar chart on the next few pages, but I recommend watching the video to understand What actually happened In benchmark tests, and how CPU performance changed dramatically from moment to moment. I also identified specific pressure points in the game, which can reduce the frame rate below 60fps-yes, even with the most powerful gaming CPU on the market with the RTX 2080 Ti.

I used Nvidia's King of Consumer GPUs to test all games at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions. If you plan to boot as much power as possible at the highest frame rate possible, consider the 1080p benchmark and you might get this experience-perhaps for a 1080p 240Hz display. I don't recommend you to do this, because you are CPU-bound for almost the entire process, which usually results in ugly stuttering. What is the result of 1440p? Well, many RTX 2080 Tis run at this resolution, but from my perspective, this represents a system with unbalanced GPU power and CPU power. Think of this as a system that can be upgraded with a CPU. In the end, the 4K results are a good representation of what I think is a balanced gaming PC-in most cases the GPU is limited by you, but the CPU overhead for most gaming scenarios is still significant.

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X analysis