Gaming Performance

Our gaming tests below are a small subset of what I would like to evaluate Ryzen with, but due to timing, this is what we could do and feel confident in. I decided to do testing at 1080p, but not any kind of “Low” or “Medium” presets as I just didn’t feel that was in any way indicative of how a consumer buying a $400-500 CPU would game. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that 1080p performance is NOT important as a great many gamers are still running 1080p displays. But at Very High to Ultra quality settings, we are right in the wheel house of what a user with a GTX 1070/1080 class GPU would do.

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)

This result is using the latest v26118 patch and shows the performance advantage to AMD in both comparisons.

Civilization VI (DX12)

The Civ 6 test is very frequency dependent and because of this the 1600X keeps up with the 7600K. The 1500X outperforms the Core i5-7500 by a noticeable gap.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (DX12)

Even at 1080p, the performance between these two platforms is identical, showing very little CPU to CPU variation.

Far Cry Primal (DX11)

Far Cry Primal is 21% faster with the 7600K than on the Ryzen 5 1600X, the first substantial disadvantage in noted performance. Interestingly, the Core i5-7500 drops down to the same performance levels as the Ryzen 5 parts.

Grand Theft Auto: V (DX11)

The Intel processors are faster, the 7600K by 17% over the Ryzen 5 1600X and the 7500 by 19% over the 1500X. These are noticeable and measurable differences that will likely continue the debate around 1080p gaming performance on the Ryzen platform.

Hitman (DX12)

Hitman in DX12 continues to be an interesting data point for Ryzen. It clearly can take advantage of higher thread counts (as noted by the 7700K result and our data from the Ryzen 7 launch review) but that advantage isn’t enough to for the Ryzen 5 to overtake the Core i5 processors in our testing here. It does match performance of the Core i5, which is a win for AMD overall, but sets up more for an interesting “gaming performance” debate later on.

Rise of the Tomb Raider (DX12)

The Intel Core i5 processors still have the strong advantage in Rise of the Tomb Raider’s integrated test. (One avenue to possibly dive into is the debate of integrated benchmarks versus in-game testing. This is a big rabbit hold to dive in at this point though, so tread lightly.)

Ghost Recon: Wildlands (DX11)

The Core i5-7600K and 7500 have the edge in Wildlands 1080p testing, by 6-7%. It’s not a huge delta but will be another data point to support the claim of superior gaming performance on Intel processors.

Results in our Ryzen 5 testing remains aligned with what we saw in our Ryzen 7 comparisons – the new AMD processors still have an issue with 1080p gaming performance results when going up against the current generation Intel architecture.

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