The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTShadow of Mordor
The next title in our testing is a battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor (SoM for short). Produced by Monolith and using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
A 2014 game is fairly old to be testing now, however SoM has a stable code and player base, and can still stress a PC down to the ones and zeroes. At the time, SoM was unique, offering a dynamic screen resolution setting allowing users to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. This form of natural oversampling was designed to let the user experience a truer vision of what the developers wanted, assuming you had the graphics hardware to power it but had a sub-4K monitor.
The title has an in-game benchmark, for which we run with an automated script implement the graphics settings, select the benchmark, and parse the frame-time output which is dumped on the drive. The graphics settings include standard options such as Graphical Quality, Lighting, Mesh, Motion Blur, Shadow Quality, Textures, Vegetation Range, Depth of Field, Transparency and Tessellation. There are standard presets as well.
We run the benchmark at 1080p and a native 4K, using our 4K monitors, at the Ultra preset. Results are averaged across four runs and we report the average frame rate, 99th percentile frame rate, and time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
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ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance
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Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance
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Zoeff - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yeeeees! Thanks for the review! I was hoping there'd be an embargo lift at this hour. :DZingam - Sunday, August 13, 2017 - link
The best CPUs for MineSweeper in 2017 in a single article!!!!NikosD - Monday, August 14, 2017 - link
Anandtech is simply wrong regarding Game mode or "Legacy Compatibility Mode" as you prefer to call it and make jokes about it.It seems that you don't know what ALL other reviewers say that Game mode doesn't set SMT off, but it disables one die.
So, Threadripper doesn't become a 16C/16T CPU after enabling Game mode as you say, but a 8C/16T CPU like ALL other reviewers say.
Go read Tom's Hardware which says that Game mode executes "bcdedit /set numproc XX" in order to cut 8 cores and shrink the CPU to one die (8C/16T) but because that's a software restriction the memory and PCIe controller of the second die is still alive, giving Quad Channel memory support and full 60+4 PCIe lanes even in Game mode.
And you thought you are smart and funny regarding your Game mode comments...
monglerbongler - Tuesday, July 10, 2018 - link
real renderers buy epyc or xeon. Either they have the money because its corporate money, they have the money because it comes from plebs paying someone comission/subscription money, or they have the money because they are plebs buying pre-built workstations.craptasticlemon - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Here's the real Threadripper review:AMD thrashes Intel i9 in every possible way, smushes it's puny ass into the dirt, and dances on the grave for the coup de gras. It is very entertaining to watch the paid Intel lackeys here try to paper over what is clearly a superior product. Keep up with the gaming scores guys, like anyone is buying this for gaming. I for one am looking forward to those delicious 40% faster render times, for the same price as the Intel space heater.
alysdexia - Thursday, April 18, 2019 - link
its, shit-headswifter
Dr. Swag - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
In paragraph two you say Ryzen 3 has double the threads of i3, I think you mean to say double the cores :)IanHagen - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Not trying to nitpick or imply anything but... There is a logical reason for Threadripper getting five pages of gaming performance review and Skylake-X not even appearing on the charts more than a month after it was reviewed?Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Bottom of page one.IanHagen - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
With all due respect Mr. Cutress, "circumstances beyond our control" and "odd BIOS/firmware gaming results" didn't prevent anyone from bashing Ryzen for its gaming performance on its debut.