The Tech Report tested the gaming prowess of the new Ryzen 2 chips in a variety of games at 1080p; as the 1080 Ti they used in all the test systems equalled the playing field so that the CPU performance could been seen. If you game at higher resolutions, then the performance delta is moot as it is your GPU which is handling the load but at 1080p gaming, CPU and DDR frequency matters. While the new chips did not manage to surpass Intel's they closed the gap noticeably compared to the initial generation of Ryzens and they were capable of doing something Intel's offerings simply can't. Those who like to stream their games while they play would do well to consider the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 1800X as they offered a significantly better experience and were the only ones capable of a decent stream of the latest Deus Ex game.
"AMD's second-generation Ryzen CPUs have impressive productivity chops, but do they have game? We ran the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 5 2600X through our high-refresh-rate gaming and streaming gauntlet to find out."
Here are some more Processor articles from around the web:
- AMD Precision Boost 2 and Wraith Prism Deep Dive @ [H]ard|OCP
- Ryzen 5 2600X vs. 2600: Which should you buy @ TechSpot
- AMD Ryzen 5 2600X @ Kitguru
- 4GHz CPU Battle: AMD 2nd-Gen Ryzen vs. Intel 8th-Gen Core @ Kitguru
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X @ Kitguru
- AMD Ryzen 5 2600 @ TechSpot
- Intel Core i5-8600 3.1 GHz @ TechPowerUp
- The Best Value CPU: Pentium Gold G5400 vs. Ryzen 3 2200G @ TechSpot
Gaming + streaming is a niche
Gaming + streaming is a niche use case. Even more, when you are serious about streaming, you will very likely have dedicated hardware (usually a second PC) for streaming purposes.
Fits well with Ryzen’s production-oriented strengths, naturally.
No as Threadripper and it’s 2
No as Threadripper and it’s 2 Zen/Zeppelin dies can be made to act like a Logical 2 socket NUMA system and the dies’ cores/threads affinity for the game’s uasge set to one die while the streaming/encoding workload application affnity set to make use of the other die’s 8 core/16 threads. And each Zen/Zeppelin die can be assigned its own NUMA mode allotment of near memory(dual channel). So the game and the streaming application each get their own dual memory channels with no memory access contention issues for the game’s access to memory at the lowest latency or the streaming application’s access to memory at the lowest latency for memory access requests.
So Threadripper with its/OS’s ability to treat those 2 Zen/Zeppelin dies on that MCM module as 2 NUMA like separate sockets is similar to have 2 computing systems in one for gaming on one Zen/Zeppelin die’s near memory dual channel allotment while the other Zen/Zeppelin die takes the streaming/encoding duty and that die’s 2 memory channels to its near memory.
When I made the jump to
When I made the jump to streaming I went for the 1700 because not many can afford to build two high-end boxes. A little OC magic and I’m streaming 1080p 60fps and have no problem staying above 90FPS on High and Ultra settings in demanding games like PUBG.
It’s so nice that there’s serious competition back in the CPU space.