Gaming Performance
Legacy Compatibility Mode
Like we saw with the original Threadripper CPUs, the 2990WX and 2950X can enable a "Legacy Compatibility Mode" from within the Ryzen Master software. This mode disables some of the CPU cores to provide compatibility with some applications that may not behave well with high core counts. This type of behavior is most applicable in games.
Along with the "1/2 core" mode we saw with the 1950X last year, the 2990WX provides a "1/4 core" mode, which will disable all but one of the CPU dies, essentially emulating a Ryzen 7 2700X. Switching between these modes requires a full system reset, as it's an option set in Windows' BCD boot file. Keep in mind that both "1/2 core" mode on the 2950X and "1/4 core" mode on the 2990WX cuts the available memory bandwidth in half, back to 2 channel mode.
We performed our gaming testing at 1080P with the 2950X and 2990WX in stock configurations, as well as the 2990WX in "1/4 core" mode. This mode is referred to as "gaming mode" in our charts for brevity's sake.
3DMark Time Spy
Starting off with a synthetic gaming test, 3DMark Time Spy, we already start to see issues with gaming on the workstation-focused 2990WX.
The 2950X has the second highest Overall score, with a score less than a percent lower than the 7960X. In fact, we would consider these scores close enough to be considered a draw.
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (DX12)
Ashes of the Escalation in DX12 mode is a benchmark that is known for good scaling as core count increases, with the 2950X providing an over 2% improvement over the 7960X.
The 2990WX however, even in compatibility mode is the slowest CPU in this test.
Ghost Recon: Wildlands
Wildlands is the first game that we've come across that wouldn't function with the fully enabled 32-core 2990WX, crashing on application launch instead.
While the 8700K is the clear leader by 5-6%, all of the other high-core count CPUs perform similarly, including the 2990WX in "gaming mode."
Civilization: VI
While both the 2950X and 2990WX provide a healthy 10% bump over the previous generation Threadripper CPUs, both fall 5-10% short of the Intel Skylake-X options.
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V is the first game where we see a need for the compatibility mode with the Threadripper 2990WX. In the full 32-core mode, the performance is less than half when the processor is in "1/4 core" mode.
The 2950X, however, is within 1 FPS of the highest-performing Intel Skylake-X offering.
Assassin's Creed: Origins
While the gap isn't quite as high as we saw in Grand Theft Auto V, the Threadripper 2990WX takes a significant performance hit in its default state for Assassin's Creed Origins.
The 2950X sees a 5% edge over the Skylake-X processor and even manages to eek out the Intel i7-8700K.
Total War: Warhammer II
Without compatibility mode enabled, the performance of the Threadripper 2990WX is obliterated in Total War: Warhammer II.
Overall, the AMD Threadripper processors see a healthy performance advantage over the Intel Skylake-X processors.
F1 2017
F1 2017 is another title which sees a significant performance advantage between modes with the 2990WX, with almost double the frame rate achieved in legacy mode.
Intel Skylake-X processors take the slight performance advantage of about 5% over the Threadripper 2950X
For Honor
For Honor presents a unique behavior with the Threadripper 2990WX. While in full 32-core mode, the 2990WX sits among the highest performers, legacy compatibility mode enabled the 2990WX to reach similar performance levels seen with the Ryzen 7 2700X.
The Threadripper 2950X provides a slight advantage over the Skylake-X processors like the i9-7960X and i9-7980XE.
Middle-Earth: Shadow of War
The Threadripper 2950X ends up around 3% slower than the Skylake-X processors in Shadow of War.
Threadripper 2990WX sees a modest 25% performance gain by moving to compatbility mode.
Forza Motorsport 7
There is little performance difference between any of the 2nd generation Threadripper and Skylake-X offerings in Forza Motorsport 7, with the advantage going towards the Intel processors.
Far Cry 5
Far Cry 5 was the other title that we found wouldn't launch without legacy compatibility mode enabled on the 2990WX. However, with "1/4 core" mode enabled, the gaming performance in Far Cry 5 is almost identical to a Ryzen 7 2700X.
The 2950X however, sees FPS 7% lower than the Intel 7900-series processors.
Overall, the gaming performance story of the 2nd generation Threadripper processors is a bit of a mixed bag. While the 32-core 2990WX processor has significant performance issues without enabling legacy mode in several games and refuses to launch in others, the 2950X is an entirely different story.
In fact, the 2950X is probably the most competitive Ryzen processor ever, when comparing gaming performance to similar Intel processors. At higher resolutions, this performance gap should be non-existent.
However, since enabling legacy compatibility mode requires a system reboot, it marks an inconvenient trade-off between people who want the extremely high core count for things like 3D rendering, but also want to be able to play games. Think of a game developer, who could very well have to reboot their computer in a different mode to properly playtest their game.
“Due to this, the WX-series
“Due to this, the WX-series Threadripper processors must remain in a NUMA configuration, and present themselves as four individual NUMA nodes to an operating system, akin to a quad-CPU system. Additionally, the Infinity Fabric link between each of these dies is effectively running at half the speed of the 2-die arrangement found with the X-series processors.”
What are yoh refering to here? AFAIK, it is fully connected in the 4 die threadripper, just like it is in Epyc. In the two die variant, you only have one link between the two die and that is it. In the 4 die variant, they have 3 links in use each to connect to the other 3 die with a single hop latency. I don’t think I would refer to anything as half speed other than the memory bandwidth. I suspect that windows does not have the necessary NUMA optimizations to handle such a configuration properly anyway. I would be running linux on such a system. It gets a lot of use in HPC and can handle, in some cases, thousands of processor cores with a wide variety of memory configurations.
The mp3 encode as a benchmark does seem a bit odd. The gamming benchmarks, while not really odd, are of little importance. If you are going to buy a $900 or $1700 dollar processor for gaming at 1080p, unless you are using a software renderer, it would be a compelete waste. For game developers, this might still be a good system, assuming you are a developer capable of making your game perform well with many cores available, or at least not crash on start-up. As noted, windows looks like a problem here. It might have been good to test at 4k, just to see if it is graphics card limited, or whether the cpu is the bottleneck. It could hit windows scaling issues though. Also, nvidia’s driver is probably a near worst case scenario on any system that doesn’t have a single, last level cache. It seems to have a lot of fine grained, thread to thread communication. Maintaining a single last level cache with good latency is a major bottleneck to scaling to more cores, so it would be better in most cases if it would just go away, and developers would optimize their software for multiple core clusters They have to do that anyway for the consoles with similar 4 core cluster architectures. I wouldn’t be surprised to see cell phones go with core clusters also, due to better power consumption.
Well, off to look for linux compile benchmarks on Threadripper.
I stumbled on this customer
I stumbled on this customer review of the TR 1900X at Newegg:
“- Large 20% memory performance difference between NUMA and non-NUMA settings.
“On my system, the NUMA setting (memory interleave on) for some reason reduces CPU performance by
about 15%, while boosting RAM performance by 20%.”
…
“Wish amd could improve the memory controller and reduce CPU-RAM latency to competitive levels.”
Perhaps this is something to consider, and compare, when benching TR2 CPUs.
p.s. I believe der8auer at
p.s. I believe der8auer at YouTube switched memory interleave ON when running 2 x ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 add-in cards with 8 x Samsung 960 Pro NVMe SSDs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CoAyjzJWfw
fast-forward starting around 7:30 on the counter
for the BIOS setup in that video
@ 8:07 on the counter: “Memory Interleaving”
Paul Alcorn’s recent article
Paul Alcorn’s recent article is a fun and easy read:
“AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2 vs. Intel Skylake-X:
Battle of the High-End CPUs” (August 14, 2018)