How is Intel Beating AMD Zen 3 Ryzen in Gaming?

[Forza.Milan]

If you know the full power of certain hardware can only be shown by testing it with with a fast GPU and a fast memory, then you should simply do it.

For my future processor reviews, I'll definitely upgrade to Ampere, or RDNA2 if that turns out to be the more popular choice on the market.

When have you ever looked that "the most popular choice"? You have never changed your test system to AMD despite AMD beating Intel in sales 10 to 1. You have always used "the fastest ont he market" to eliminate bottlenecks. Now that there is a chance of AMD beating the 3090 you suggest using the "more popular choice" ( = Nvidia because they have biggest mindshare in GPU market ).

I'm also thinking about upping the memory speeds a bit, DDR4-3600 seems like a good balance between cost and performance. I doubt I'll pick DDR4-3800 or 4000 just because AMD runs faster with it—guess I'll still get flak from the AMD fanboys.

Smart of you of already putting a label on people that would give critic to your test methods. You tested all the RTX 30xx cards with a system using DDR4 4000 despite it being far from the best balance between cost and performance. But now that you know for a fact that Ryzen 5000 benefits from high-speed memory ( and this is not exactly breaking news... ) you think about upgrading to DDR4 3600 and not 3800 or 4000? Come on man...

Either you always use the fastest hardware to eliminate possible bottlenecks or either you use hardware that most readers can relate to ( = most popular in sales or best price/performance ratio ) but by cherry picking the fastest hardware in one review and then using the "best value" hardware in another review, you make yourself look less thrustworty.

But hey, because I don't agree with your arguments, I'll simply be marked as an AMD fanboy I guess.

And soon it's gonna be 2021, time to add 1%lows & frametime graphs to CPU reviews. When someone reads your reviews and sees the 5900X leading the 2700x by only 5% on 1440p in Battlefield V they might actually think that's the case. In reality 2700x has many framedrops and much lower 1% lows then a 5900x. I know because I already noticed a massive increase when I upgraded from 2700x to the 3900x.

I very much agree, no doubt

 

[Flanker]

I have no words for people that send shitty emails to reviewers lol.

 

[Forza.Milan]

Very nice review, quality of benchmark is superb. Very nice job!

One question tho, why do you title it How is Intel Beating AMD Zen 3 Ryzen in Gaming? if your conclusion is that amd is wining?

The title is sarcasm to all people who already sent complaint.

 

[Prima.Vera]

The answer is simple PCI-E 3.0 vs PCI-E 4.0. Especially on the top GPUs.

 

[tirasoft]

Intel fans have gone very quiet, what's wrong guys?

Maybe I am enjoying My Mate 14 AMD Ryzen 7 4800H Laptop , which is an excellent piece of Laptop, far better than Intel counterparts, raw power, value/money as well.
So good you cannot find it to buy easily, I am lucky to get one....

 

[mechtech]

Thread started out ok then turned into more drama than a DrPhil episode, except over a piece of silicon that will be old news and obsolete in 5 years.

 

[Bruno_O]

I had posted my concerns on the 5900X review (and how cheap / sweet spot a 3600 C16 kit is), so I'm very happy that this whole thing has been cleared out. Good job mate.

 

[chrisloh]

This is so funny in so many levels. You are comparing (analogy) Usian Bolt Vs a regular person when both are almost out of energy...of course the gap will close.

Theory of diminishing return comes into mind.

In real life, no one will ever push beyond 80% cpu. The only way to go beyond 80% is to run all the program actively. For a streamer, it means running all your streaming prog, games, video editing, sound editing all simultaneously. (At least this above statement is very true for me and my fellow streamers)

In conclusion, this is just a test tube benchmark to glorify intel, trying to say their dated technology can close the gap with the new ryzen zen 3.

 

[Caring1]

Thread started out ok then turned into more drama than a DrPhil episode, except over a piece of silicon that will be old news and obsolete in 5 years.

But not quite Gerry Springer yet. (unless someone at home has thrown a chair)

This is so funny in so many levels. You are comparing (analogy) Usian Bolt Vs a regular person when both are almost out of energy...of course the gap will close.

Theory of diminishing return comes into mind.

In real life, no one will ever push beyond 80% cpu.

Crunchers disagree, it's common to use 100% CPU or close to it.

 

[Zubasa]

Literate people had no problems understanding the original review, this one is for noobs.

Isn't the providing information to "noobs" (people that are less informed, in this case a new CPU, thus no one else is better informed than the reviwers yet) the whole point of a review?

 

[HTC]

Impressive followup @W1zzard.

As for memory speed testing, may I suggest stick to what the CPU is rated for (in the case of Ryzen, 3200mhz) and tighten timings. I'm not entirely enthused by fanbois from both sides pushing for overclocks (Ryzen with Memory, Intel with MCE) to better 'show' why their platform is faster even though the chip is now operating outside of spec (even if its within tolerance), and neither do I think reviewers should either (or need to be testing both scenarios IMO - but if testing both, where do you draw the line in the sand?).

Agreed.

Later, in the "OC section" of the review, it could be shown the effect of "just CPU MHz", "just RAM OC" and both pretty much like you do today (with a single benchmark to ascertain the performance increase), so that a prospective buyer could see which part is best to invest in (for those on a more tight budget), in order to maximize potential OCs.

 

[TumbleGeorge]

Ryzen 5800x 8 core CPU 549USD

Prices of new AMD generation products will be fixed after Rocket Lake S released and Nvidia release own SAM like performance boosting on Ampere.

 

[arbiter]

What about DX11? When i use dx12 i seem to get slower fps then when i switch to dx11. Its pretty much case in every game i have played now granted my system is on the older side right now but its been consistent trend for me at least.

 

[olstyle]

What about DX11? When i use dx12 i seem to get slower fps then when i switch to dx11.

That's a Pascal Issue. Those are basically DX11 cards with DX12 driver emulation. They are missing the bumped up HW scheduling of >=Turing and >=GCN GPUs.
@W1zzard: A superb and unique test. Thank you for that. A statement from AMD about the "Intel bump" would be appreciated. Did you contact them about it?

 

[rusTORK]

Just one thing about memory. Please don’t forget about actual performance gain.

3200CL14 is good, but 3600CL16 not much better. It have got higher frequency (+400 MHz), but even worse latency (8,75ns vs 8,89ns). So, only frequency was overclocked effectively, latency got penalty. And respond what we saw was only on frequency. It’s not bad if need to know respond only on frequency, but it’s not effective overclock. For latency respond (with same frequency for example) need another test (like 3200CL12 or 3600CL15).

P.S. This article is super interesting. I think we need series of it.

 

[ratirt]

@W1zzard Bro you killed me with the test and benchmarks. :/ I've been considering staying with my 2700X and skip the 5900X (my plan) due to the 4K and now I need to start over. I would like to see the PCI-e 3 vs 4 comparison as well. Wonder what will the 5000 series look like with the new 6000 series. Would this benchmarking be a standard now? I'm sure there is some things to improve or add but is that how it will be done now? The 1% lows would have been a nice thing though.
Awesome test BTW thanks

 

[Arcdar]

See Wizzard, that's one of the reasons I came to this site and stayed.

You don't give up easily and get Angry About some mails People wrote in the "wrong state of mind".... I wish many of them would read "The Wisdome of insecurity" or "the way of Zen" from Alan Watts though, it would save People like you, who do this because you love to do what you do and it's actually a "public Service" a lot of not so reasonable mails from ungreatful minds written in unjustified Anger.

Thanks again for sitting down and going above and beyond what most Reviewers would do trying to figure out what is going on and giving us those really extensive Tests --- again, after you already did more than one run of them anyway. I can't imagine how much time all of this took you for our "reading pleasure of 10 Minutes" (I read fast, sorry ^^ … didn't want to devalue your work with that comment )

I love your work, dedication and General Approach of the subject (and I'm happy to see a fellow German - if I remember correctly - being so successfull in this tough international Waters )



Cheers from Oktoberfest-Town and thanks again for this interesting update

 

[nguyen]

Looks like Ampere GPUs deserve a retest with 5900X + 32GB 3800mhz RAM testing rig , so much CPU+RAM bottlenecks with the current TPU testing rig there.

 

[dyonoctis]

On STOCK , Ryzen Zen 3 5000 line is better than Intel . Also , clearly on productivity task (tha'ts not new).

BUT , if in terms of overclocked CPU's :
- 8 cores i7-10700k is better in games compared to Ryzen 8500x (8 cores).
- Intel i9-10900k overclocked is better than ANY Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 PCU's in games (overclocked or not) . By quite a serios margin for some games ...

SO : Intel is still the king of gaming over the Zen 3 5000 series ....

King of gaming when the user is willing to make those tweaks. Gamers isn't = tech nerd, some people just want to buy a pc plug it in, and play without having to get trough the process of finding the best frequency at wich voltage, etc...
Since I'm also using my pc for productivty, I avoid OC at all cost, I don't want to crash while doing a render because my settings weren't actually stable.

It's all about context : I'm an OC enthusiast, therefore Intel is the king. But if I don't wan't to OC, AMD is the gaming king.

 

[Stimer111]

We are not living for test, but for fast machines.
I long time dream is build 1440P, 240-360FPS Gaming machine.
Monitors are ready
So questions is ?
can you build it with AMD CPU ?
can you build it with Intel CPU ?
With GPU like RTX 3070 is just questions of game right settings for most games

what Other parts do we need
which kind of RAM
Which PCIE
Which MB
....

Lets build real machine.

 

[pandemonium]

Appreciate the dive into your review discrepancy.

However, I thought the primary reason to test CPU performance for gaming was done with minimum FPS, and show 95th/99th percentiles of frame time draws? Inexorably, IPC of the CPU?

 

[ratirt]

We are not living for test, but for fast machines.
I long time dream is build 1440P, 240-360FPS Gaming machine.
Monitors are ready
So questions is ?
can you build it with AMD CPU ?
can you build it with Intel CPU ?
With GPU like RTX 3070 is just questions of game right settings for most games

what Other parts do we need
which kind of RAM
Which PCIE
Which MB
....

Lets build real machine.

You can build 1440p gaming rig with both Intel and AMD.
What surprises me is 3070 and you want 240-360 FPS? You'd be better off with 2080TI here. (It does have the OC potential) In either case, I don't think that is going to happen bro. I assume that the 240FPS is the minimum you would want?

 

[Charcharo]

I know the video and Jufe himself ...
Have access to the Discord channel already , lol.

Jules doesn't know what a draw call is. Love the dude for his test, but he has extreme "Gamer Enthusiast" Syndrome. He knows little about hardware or how it works in the real world, he only knows how to make it faster, and only in gaming, no other thing.

The reason he was so wrong on his earlier Zen 3 predictions (where he believed Intel would be much faster OC to OC and not "perhaps slightly faster" as he is saying now) is because he did'nt know how latency works, he doesn't know how the IO die works and didnt know about CPU draw calls.

Ironically, Zen 3 still has low draw call performance.

EDIT:

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

thank you @W1zzard

 

[Sybaris_Caesar]

Forums really needs a review/article notification for degenerates like me who access the site from techpowerup.com/forums link instead of the homepage. I saw the article only after visiting the r/hardware subreddit.

Great piece btw. Reason of discrepancy isn't known yet but good to know we found out where the discrepancy was happening. Kudos!

As for test bench I think going with going with Ryzen 5000 is the way to go atm. My reasoning is, pick the fastest CPU during when a new GPU generation is releasing. GPU generational changes aren't yearly anymore and almost reaching bi-yearly (RTX 2080 - Sept, 20 2018 ~ RTX 3080 - Sept, 17 2020).
RTX 3080, 3090 and 3070 didn't have the luxury of being benched on Ryzen 5000 series I understand but I think upcoming RDNA 2 and rest of Ampere should be tested on the faster platform.

And I think raw, native, default, resterized performance should be benched. Variable shading, DLSS (and similar tech from AMD), SAM (and similar tech from Nvidia), ray tracing performance should be treated as outliers. Specially ray teacing. My opinion is unless games become fully ray traced, the partial ray tracing effects should be treated as Hairworks, PhysX, TressFX etc. To be turned off when reviewing.