Media Encoding and Rendering
Audacity MP3 Encode
Audacity MP3 encoding is a very single threaded operation and the Intel Kaby Lake processors advantages here are clear. The 7700K is 31% faster than the Ryzen R7 1800X. Compared to the 6900K the 1800X finds itself at a 10% disadvantage.
Handbrake 1.0.2
Handbrake is an interesting discussion: clearly the Ryzen R7 1800X does very well, bring in a time of 353 seconds and beating the Core i7-7700K by 33% when we only look at CPU based encoding. However, if you look at QuickSync enabled encode that Handbrake does support, the 7700K has the edge. It’s fair to say that QSV-based encodes will have different quality settings and options, making them less than ideal, but the option is there for the Kaby Lake parts with integrated graphics. Even still, the 1800X is about 5% faster than the 6900K (that does not have the potential for QSV acceleration).
X264 Benchmark 5.0.1
In our X264 encode test, the 1800X is faster than the 7700K in both passes, though it trades blows with the 6900K.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is going to get a lot of attention as it is the primary source for much AMD’s performance claims. In our single threaded test, the 1800X does okay, falling behind the 7700K by 18% but beating all three of the Broadwell-E systems. That’s interesting because in several other tests the 7700K/1800X gap has been wider and the 6900K was able to maintain parity. When we look at multi-threaded results the 1800X is beaten only the by the 10-core 6950X and crushes the 4C Kaby Lake parts.
POV-Ray
Similarly to the multi-threaded test above, POV-Ray shows that the 1800X will beat any processor by the 6950X and can maintain a 10% lead over the 6900K!
Blender 2.78b
Blender got a lot of press last year as it was the first official benchmark provided by AMD against Intel but since that time we have a couple of performance revisions. And we are using Blender’s standard benchmark workloads rather than anything custom. In the BMW test, we see the 1800X is 23% faster than the 7700K, even though it has 2x the core count. The 6900K can maintain a performance lead over the new Ryzen CPU by 14%. In the Gooseberry test the advantage for the 1800X over the 7700K jumps to 27% and the advantage for the 6900K over the 1800X drops to 9.9%.
So, did it ever occur to the
So, did it ever occur to the reviewer that the a bit slower performance in some software (games included) is actually due to poor optimizations?
The industry used the last decade or so to specifically optimize for Intel.
Ryzen is fairly new by comparison, but it demonstrated that it got up to 30% increase in performance through simple patches in games.
Audacity and many other software like it are not optimized for Ryzen architecture.
They are taking advantage of every possible trick in Intel’s hand, and yet barely anything or none of it actually benefits Ryzen performance-wise.
Plus, the Infinity fabric in Ryzen is sensitive to RAM speeds.
2400 MhZ speed on RAM is simply inadequate for Ryzen… 3000 MhZ would be better as that would raise it’s performance by about 10%.
Other than RAM speeds, software optimizations are required to take advantage of Ryzen’s capabilities.
Otherwise, you might as well be comparing apples and oranges right now.
It actually shows that Ryzen via ‘brute force’ is highly competitive for all Intel’s products… just imagine what might happen if we get developers to actively support for Ryzen – of course, this will probably require time as devs usually optimize for hardware they are paid to optimize for – and as we know, both Intel and Nvidia have deep pockets to sway devs to support their own hardware specifically and make AMD look bad (when in reality, its anything but).