Gaming and streaming with AMD’s second-gen Ryzen CPUs

Finally. After an eventful week in the world of hardware benchmarking, I’ve wrapped up our gaming test results for AMD’s second-generation Ryzen CPUs. We’ve taken some extra time to bench each Intel and AMD chip in our test suite with stock RAM as well as overclocked speeds. The wealth of resulting data has taken more time to crunch than I would have liked, but hey, we’ve got it.

If you missed our productivity benchmarks of AMD’s latest CPUs, be sure to check out our launch-day article. I won’t be rehashing that material too much here. Let’s jump right into our testing methods and our results.

Our testing methods
As always, we did our best to deliver clean benchmarking numbers. We ran each benchmark at least three times and took the median of those results. Our test systems were configured as follows:

 

 

They all shared the following common elements:

Some other notes on our testing methods:

• All test systems were updated with the latest firmware and Windows updates before we began collecting data, including patches for the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities where applicable. As a result, test data from this review should not be compared with results collected in past TR reviews. Similarly, all applications used in the course of data collection were the most current versions available as of press time and cannot be used to cross-compare with older data.
• Our test systems were all configured using the Windows Balanced power plan, including AMD systems that previously would have used the Ryzen Balanced plan. AMD’s suggested configuration for its CPUs no longer includes the Ryzen Balanced power plan as of Windows’ Fall Creators Update, also known as “RS3” or Redstone 3.
• Unless otherwise noted, our gaming tests were conducted at 1920×1080. Our test system’s monitor was set to refresh at 60 Hz.

Our testing methods are generally publicly available and reproducible. If you have any questions regarding our testing methods, feel free to leave a comment on this article or join us in the forums to discuss them.

Crysis 3
Even as it passes six years of age, Crysis 3 remains one of the most punishing games one can run. With an appetite for CPU performance and graphics power alike, this title remains a great way to put the performance of any gaming system in perspective.

Crysis 3 is still an unusual beast in that it will happily take advantage of every core and thread one can throw at it in high-refresh-rate gaming. That’s good news for Ryzen CPUs, as their performance scales both thread-for-thread and generation-to-generation in this title. Even with DDR4-2933, the Ryzen 7 2700X isn’t trailing the i7-8700K by much in either average frame rates or 99th-percentile frame times, and throwing DDR4-3400 into the mix tightens the gap just that little bit more. Meanwhile, the Ryzen 5 2600X matches the Ryzen 7 1800X for both fluidity and smoothness.

These “time spent beyond X” graphs are meant to show “badness,” those instances where animation may be less than fluid—or at least less than perfect. The formulas behind these graphs add up the amount of time our graphics card spends beyond certain frame-time thresholds, each with an important implication for gaming smoothness. Recall that our graphics-card tests all consist of one-minute test runs and that 1000 ms equals one second to fully appreciate this data.

The 50-ms threshold is the most notable one, since it corresponds to a 20-FPS average. We figure if you’re not rendering any faster than 20 FPS, even for a moment, then the user is likely to perceive a slowdown. 33 ms correlates to 30 FPS, or a 30-Hz refresh rate. Go lower than that with vsync on, and you’re into the bad voodoo of quantization slowdowns. 16.7 ms correlates to 60 FPS, that golden mark that we’d like to achieve (or surpass) for each and every frame.

To best demonstrate the performance of these systems with a powerful graphics card like the GTX 1080 Ti, it’s useful to look at our three strictest graphs. 8.3 ms corresponds to 120 FPS, the lower end of what we’d consider a high-refresh-rate monitor. We’ve recently begun including an even more demanding 6.94-ms mark that corresponds to the 144-Hz maximum rate typical of today’s high-refresh-rate gaming displays. Finally, we’ve added a 5-ms graph to see how well any of our chips sustain a scorching 200 FPS.

Given how fast our GTX 1080 Ti runs Crysis 3, it makes the most sense to start our exploration at the 8.3-ms mark. Here, we can see that the Ryzen 7 2700X and the Core i7-8700K are about as well-matched as our broad overview would suggest. Both CPUs hold up the GTX 1080 Ti for less than a second on tough frames that take longer than 8.3 ms to render. The Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 1800X also turn in impressively clean records here. Flip over to the 6.94 ms mark, though, and it’s obvious that the i7-8700K is keeping the GTX 1080 Ti just that bit more well-fed for 144-Hz action.

Far Cry 5

In our observations, Far Cry 5 tends to max out a single thread, so it’s no shock that our average-FPS numbers and 99th-percentile frame times favor Intel CPUs. Among the Ryzen gang, both of our second-gen contenders solidly outperform their forebears. Even a Ryzen 5 2600X with stock-clocked RAM can overtake a Ryzen 7 1800X using DDR4-3400. To be fair, we’re talking extremely minor generation-to-generation differences, but it’s clear that second-gen Ryzen parts deliver important performance improvements.

Aside from a few frame-time spikes that seem to plague all of our CPUs in Far Cry 5, it’s most instructive to check out our chips’ performance at the 8.3-ms mark. The Ryzen 7 2700X puts the best face on AMD’s Far Cry 5 performance, but there’s no denying that Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake CPUs put just that little extra bit of polish on the experience. That’s especially obvious at the 6.94-ms mark, where our Intel contenders with overclocked RAM are putting half the time on the board compared to even the Ryzen 7 2700X paired with DDR4-3400.

Assassin’s Creed Origins
Assassin’s Creed Origins isn’t just striking to look at. It’ll happily scale with CPU cores, and that makes it an ideal case for our test bench.

Assassin’s Creed Origins seems to want the whole enchilada of CPU performance for high refresh rates: lots of high-clocked threads backed with high-speed memory. Even so, this title seems to favor Intel CPUs. Among Ryzen chips, the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 1800X perform the best, but it’s weird that the Ryzen 7 2700X doesn’t seem to gain anything from its higher Precision Boost 2 clocks relative to its predecessor. Perhaps the bottleneck is elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Core i7-7700K suffers badly until we toss it DDR4-3200 to play with.

Given the frame-rate averages in play in ACO, we’ve added an 11-ms time-spent-beyond graph to our menu here. 11 ms corresponds to time spent under 90 FPS. This plot basically confirms what our overview shows: the Ryzen 7 chips stack up with about five seconds spent on tough frames throughout our test run. Both the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 5 1600X benefit handsomely from the use of 3400 MT/s RAM, at least, but it’s nowhere near enough to catch even the Core i5-8400 here.

Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V‘s lavish simulation of Los Santos and surrounding locales can really put the hurt on a CPU, and we’re putting that characteristic to good use here.

Grand Theft Auto V has proven a constant thorn in the side for Ryzen CPUs ever since their launch, and second-gen Ryzens can only hope to close the distance in this largely single-thread-performance-dependent and memory-latency-sensitive title. No surprises—that’s basically what happens in our results. Even the $179 Core i5-8400 is delivering higher FPS averages than the $329 Ryzen 7 2700X here. Hook up both second-gen Ryzens to 3400 MT/s RAM, and they post the best 99th-percentile frame times we’ve yet seen from AMD chips in this title, at least.

Delving into our time-spent-beyond-X analysis paints a slightly kinder picture for the Ryzen 7 2700X, at least with 3400 MT/s RAM. At the 8.3-ms mark, tapping that faster memory helps the top-end second-gen Ryzen spend under a third of the time holding up the GTX 1080 Ti in this title than it does with stock RAM. At the critical 6.94-ms juncture, though, the i7-8700K proves its mettle by putting nearly six fewer seconds on the board versus the Ryzen 7 2700X, and the gap only widens for the 2700X with stock memory. The same basic story holds for the Ryzen 5 2600X. If you want the absolute smoothest high-refresh-rate GTA V experience, the extra threads of second-gen Ryzens just can’t compete with Coffee Lake.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Thanks to its richly detailed environments and copious graphics settings, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can punish graphics cards at high resolutions and make CPUs sweat at high refresh rates.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided remains another bugbear for Ryzen CPUs at high refresh rates, and the second-gen chips are once again just making up ground here compared to their predecessors.

The story here is quite simple: if you want the smoothest, most fluid Deus Ex: Mankind Divided experience at high refresh rates, any Coffee Lake CPU is the way to get there.

Streaming Far Cry 5 with OBS
Now for a change of pace. To test software-encoded streaming performance with our CPUs, we fired up the latest version of OBS Studio and captured Far Cry 5 running at 2560×1440 before feeding it through the x264 encoder using the “faster” preset, 60 FPS, and OBS’ default bitrate of 2500 kbps. Running a game at 2560×1440 while streaming the output at 1920×1080 tends to allow systems to perform CPU encoding without completely overtaxing the processor, as a CPU-bound game running at 1920×1080 might. We’ll test that torture scenario in a moment. 

We streamed the resulting footage to Twitch. Admittedly, Twitch’s recommended streaming settings have changed since our last review, and the service will accept higher-bitrate streams (4500 to 6000 kbps) as of this writing. We might need to re-examine the effects that higher bit rates have on performance in future reviews, but for now, OBS’ defaults will have to do. We verified that the resulting stream looked OK to the eye by playing it back on a separate PC in the TR labs. CPUs that couldn’t stream without noticeably dropping frames failed our test. As a result, the Core i5-8400 and Core i7-7700K don’t appear in the following charts. All of the CPUs tested below used DDR4-3400 RAM.

While same-PC streaming using software encoding is certainly a strength of Ryzen CPUs, the Core i7-8700K produces the highest frame rates and lowest 99th-percentile frame times in this scenario. The flip side is that one doesn’t need to spend more than $230 to get streaming with a Ryzen 5 2600X, say, while the Core i7-8700K is a $350 investment. Presuming one isn’t trying to go for high-refresh-rate gaming and streaming from the same PC, in fact, it looks a bit difficult to justify the Ryzen 7 2700X for that purpose alone.

A look at our time-spent-beyond graphs tells us a little more about just what the Ryzen 7 2700X is buying us, though: about two fewer seconds spent on tough frames that would drop the client-side frame rate below 90 FPS. Even so, the Ryzen 5 2600X is delivering better same-PC streaming performance than the Ryzen 7 1800X, and that’s quite impressive given that the 2600X sells for half of what the 1800X did at launch.

Streaming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided with OBS
Although streaming Far Cry 5 at a 2560×1440 source resolution is hard enough on its own, we wanted to go one further with the notoriously punishing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. We used the same streaming settings as we did with Far Cry 5, but we ran DXMD at a much-harder-on-the-CPU 1920×1080 while attempting to stream the output to Twitch at 60 FPS.

Turns out that only the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 1800X were up to the job. Even the usually imperturbable Core i7-8700K dropped an unpleasant number of frames when we attempted this stream, and the Ryzen 5s weren’t having it, either. Let’s see how the last two chips standing handled the load.

Even with this incredibly punishing setup, the Ryzen 7 2700X turns in a nice performance increase over its predecessor. Both its average FPS result and 99th-percentile frame time suggest a perfectly pleasant client-side gaming experience. It’s worth remembering that the 2700X loses a lot of performance while streaming this way, as it delivered an average of 120 FPS and a 13-ms 99th-percentile frame time in our regular testing without OBS. Even so, the 2700X (and 1800X) could deliver a subjectively pleasant stream this way, while none of the other chips in our test suite could. Can’t complain too much when you’re pushing CPUs to the limit like that.

Our time-spent-beyond graphs show just how much of an improvement one might enjoy when pushing a same-PC streaming setup to the limit like this. The Ryzen 7 2700X cuts three seconds off the Ryzen 7 1800X’s time on the board past 11 ms here, and that translates to a noticeably smoother client-side gaming experience from the second-generation chip.

Conclusions
Let’s try to sum up that outrageous amount of data in a couple convenient charts. First up, we’ll take a look at the geometric mean of average frame rates and 99th-percentile frame times from our test systems with overclocked RAM (converted to FPS so that our higher-is-better logic works).

As a matter of academic interest, we can do the same thing for our test systems using stock-clocked RAM. Here you go:

As I noted in our launch-day coverage, builders who are after the absolute best high-refresh-rate gaming performance at 1920×1080 will be leaving frames on the table with Ryzen CPUs. Even the $180 Core i5-8400 is delivering better performance than the Ryzen bunch under our test conditions, and that’s gotta sting a little for the red team. The Core i7-8700K remains the best high-refresh-rate gaming chip on the planet, and that’s before we tap into its formidable overclocking potential. Second-generation Ryzen chips do close the gap with Intel chips somewhat in our stock-clocked and CPU-bound testing conditions, but it’s not enough to steal Intel’s crown.

Of course, there are many ways around this bottleneck for folks who still want a Ryzen CPU. Upgrading to a 2560×1440, 144-Hz monitor takes some of the stress off the CPU and doesn’t incur a large performance hit on the GTX 1080 Ti, for example, and we’ve long considered those monitors the best balance of resolution and refresh rate one can buy. Gaming at 4K will make these CPUs pratically indistinguishable from one another. Builders who aren’t after the absolute highest frame rates around also won’t notice these bottlenecks nearly as acutely with a GTX 1060 6 GB or Radeon RX 580, say.

Gaming isn’t just a solitary experience these days, either. If you plan to game at high refresh rates and stream, the Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 1800X are the only two chips in our test suite that could handle the punishing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided running at 1920×1080 whlie streaming the experience to Twitch. In a less torturous setup, however, the Core i7-8700K still delivered the smoothest client-side gaming experience while gaming with Far Cry 5 at 2560×1440. The Ryzen 5 2600X really stood out in our less-torturous streaming test, too, delivering client-side gaming performance on par with the Ryzen 7 1800X while selling for less than half of the first-gen Ryzen halo chip’s launch price.

All told, our gaming tests don’t change the final word on second-gen Ryzen CPUs. If you want an enviable amount of multithreaded bang-for-the-buck that provides a fine gaming experience after hours, the Ryzen 5 2600X and Ryzen 7 2700X are your chips. But if you’re after the best high-refresh-rate gaming performance around, bar none, an order of Coffee Lake is still the way to go. The best part of today’s CPU market is that system builders can pick the parts that are right for their needs at the right price, and that simply wasn’t possible a year ago. Viva la revolución.