The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCPU System Tests
Our first set of tests is our general system tests. These set of tests are meant to emulate more about what people usually do on a system, like opening large files or processing small stacks of data. This is a bit different to our office testing, which uses more industry standard benchmarks, and a few of the benchmarks here are relatively new and different.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
FCAT Processing: link
One of the more interesting workloads that has crossed our desks in recent quarters is FCAT - the tool we use to measure stuttering in gaming due to dropped or runt frames. The FCAT process requires enabling a color-based overlay onto a game, recording the gameplay, and then parsing the video file through the analysis software. The software is mostly single-threaded, however because the video is basically in a raw format, the file size is large and requires moving a lot of data around. For our test, we take a 90-second clip of the Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark running on a GTX 980 Ti at 1440p, which comes in around 21 GB, and measure the time it takes to process through the visual analysis tool.
FCAT is a purely single threaded task, and it takes benefits from the top frequency parts and high IPC from Intel. On the AMD front, the Ryzen 5 parts are scoring better than the Ryzen 7 parts, but are within an error margin.
Dolphin Benchmark: link
Many emulators are often bound by single thread CPU performance, and general reports tended to suggest that Haswell provided a significant boost to emulator performance. This benchmark runs a Wii program that ray traces a complex 3D scene inside the Dolphin Wii emulator. Performance on this benchmark is a good proxy of the speed of Dolphin CPU emulation, which is an intensive single core task using most aspects of a CPU. Results are given in minutes, where the Wii itself scores 17.53 minutes (1052 seconds).
Dolphin is also a single threaded test, and has historically had benefits on Intel CPUs. The new Ryzen-2000 series, with extra IPC and frequency, are pushing ahead of Intel's Skylake parts.
3D Movement Algorithm Test v2.1: link
This is the latest version of the self-penned 3DPM benchmark. The goal of 3DPM is to simulate semi-optimized scientific algorithms taken directly from my doctorate thesis. Version 2.1 improves over 2.0 by passing the main particle structs by reference rather than by value, and decreasing the amount of double->float->double recasts the compiler was adding in. It affords a ~25% speed-up over v2.0, which means new data.
For this multi-threaded test, the new 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X pulls further head of Intel's 8-core Skylake-X compared to the 1800X. At six cores however, the Coffee Lake i7-8700K is sandwiched between the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 5 2600.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.3: link
Photoscan stays in our benchmark suite from the previous version, however now we are running on Windows 10 so features such as Speed Shift on the latest processors come into play. The concept of Photoscan is translating many 2D images into a 3D model - so the more detailed the images, and the more you have, the better the model. The algorithm has four stages, some single threaded and some multi-threaded, along with some cache/memory dependency in there as well. For some of the more variable threaded workload, features such as Speed Shift and XFR will be able to take advantage of CPU stalls or downtime, giving sizeable speedups on newer microarchitectures.
Photoscan is a variable threaded test, and time improvement from the 1800X to the 2700X shows the extra TDP and Precision Boost 2 can literally shave minutes from a test. Intel's slower mesh architecture of Skylake-X on the 8-core 7820X compared to the ring architecture of the Coffee Lake 8700K means that the two fewer cores on the 8700K allows them to draw level, but they are still four minutes or so behind the Ryzen 7 2700X. The big 18-core Intel CPU, the i9-7980XE, is needed to win here.
Civilization6 AI Test
Our Civilization AI test uses the steam version of Civilization 6 and runs the in-game AI test to process 25 rounds of an example end-game. We run the benchmark on our GTX 1080 at 1080p Medium to ensure that rendering is not a limiting factor, and the results are given as the geometric mean of the 25 rounds in the test, to give the average time to process one round of AI.
Parts of the AI test can use multiple threads, however the extra single core performance on Intel does push those parts into the lead.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
545 Comments
View All Comments
Marlin1975 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Looks good, guess AMD will replace my Intel system next.Just waiting for GPU and memory prices to fall.
3DoubleD - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Agreed... the waiting continuesWorldWithoutMadness - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Lol, you might even wait until Zen 2 comes out next year or even later.Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link
should be out next year as AMD has been very much on the ball with Ryzen launches more or less to the DAY they claimed would launch which is very nice...basically what they are promising for product delivery they are doing what they say IMO, not to mention TSMC recently announced volume production of their 7nm, so that likely means GloFo will be very soon to follow, and AMD can use TSMC just the same :)t.s - Tuesday, July 31, 2018 - link
What @WWM want to say is: You can wait forever for the RAM price to go down, rather than when ryzen 2 out.StevoLincolnite - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I still haven't felt limited by my old 3930K yet.Can't wait to see what Zen 2 brings and how Intel counters that.
mapesdhs - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
If you ever do fancy a bit more oomph in the meantime (and assuming IPC is less important than threaded performance, eg. HandBrake is more important than PDF loading), a decent temporary sideways step for X79 is a XEON E5-2697 v2 (IB-EP). An oc'd 3930K is quicker for single-threaded of course, but for multithreaded the XEON does very well, easily beating an oc'd 3930K, and the XEON has native PCIe 3.0 so no need to bother with the not entirely stable forced NVIDIA tool. See my results (for FireFox, set Page Style to No Style in the View menu):http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/tests-jj.txt
mapesdhs - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
Correction, I meant the 2680 v2.Samus - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
I never felt limited by my i5-4670k either, especially mildly overclocked to 4.0GHz.Until I build a new PC around the same old components because the MSI Z97 motherboard (thanks MSI) failed (it was 4 years old but still...) so I picked up a new i3-8350k + ASRock Z270 at Microcenter bundled together for $200 a month ago, and it's a joke how much faster it is than my old i5.
First off, it's noticeably faster, at STOCK, than the max stable overclock I could get on my old i5. Granted I replaced the RAM too, but still 16GB, now PC4-2400 instead of PC3-2133. Doubt it makes a huge difference.
Where things are noticeably faster comes down to boot times, app launches and gaming. All of this is on the same Intel SSD730 480GB SATA3 I've had for years. I didn't even do a fresh install, I just dropped it in and let Windows 10 rebuild the HAL, and reactivated with my product key.
Even on paper, the 8th gen i3's are faster than previous gen i5's. The i3 stock is still faster than the 4th gen i5 mildly overclocked.
I wish I waited. It's compelling (although more expensive) to build an AMD Ryzen 2 now. It really wasn't before, but now that performance is slightly better and prices are slightly lower, it would be worth the gamble.
gglaw - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
i think there's something wrong with your old Haswell setup if the difference is that noticeable. I have every generation of Intel I7 or I5 except Coffee Lake running in 2 rooms attached to each other, and I can't even notice a significant difference from my SANDY 2600k system with a SATA 850 Evo Pro sitting literally right next to my Kaby I7 with a 960 EVO NVMe SSD. I want to convince myself how much better the newer one is, but it just isn't. And this is 5 generations apart for the CPU's/mobos and using one of the fastest SSD's ever made compared to a SATA drive, although about the fastest SATA drive there is. Coffee Lake is faster than Kaby but so tiny between the equivalent I7 to I7, I can't see myself noticing a major difference.In the same room across from these 2 is my first Ryzen build, the 1800X also with an 960 EVO SSD. Again, I can barely convince myself it's a different system than the Sandy 2600k with SATA SSD. I have your exact Haswell I5 too, and it feels fast as hell still. Especially for app launches and gaming. The only time I notice major differences between these systems is when I'm encoding videos or running synthetic benchmarks. Just for the thrill of a new flagship release I just ordered the 2700X too and it'll be sitting next to the 1800X for another side by side experience. It'll be fun to setup but I'm pretty convinced I won't be able to tell the 2 systems apart when not benchmarking.