Retesting AMD Ryzen Threadripper’s Game Mode: Halving Cores for More Performance
by Ian Cutress on August 17, 2017 12:01 PM ESTCPU Web Tests
One of the issues when running web-based tests is the nature of modern browsers to automatically install updates. This means any sustained period of benchmarking will invariably fall foul of the 'it's updated beyond the state of comparison' rule, especially when browsers will update if you give them half a second to think about it. Despite this, we were able to find a series of commands to create an un-updatable version of Chrome 56 for our 2017 test suite. While this means we might not be on the bleeding edge of the latest browser, it makes the scores between CPUs comparable.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
SunSpider 1.0.2: link
The oldest web-based benchmark in this portion of our test is SunSpider. This is a very basic javascript algorithm tool, and ends up being more a measure of IPC and latency than anything else, with most high-performance CPUs scoring around about the same. The basic test is looped 10 times and the average taken. We run the basic test 4 times.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: link
Kraken is another Javascript based benchmark, using the same test harness as SunSpider, but focusing on more stringent real-world use cases and libraries, such as audio processing and image filters. Again, the basic test is looped ten times, and we run the basic test four times.
Google Octane 2.0: link
Along with Mozilla, as Google is a major browser developer, having peak JS performance is typically a critical asset when comparing against the other OS developers. In the same way that SunSpider is a very early JS benchmark, and Kraken is a bit newer, Octane aims to be more relevant to real workloads, especially in power constrained devices such as smartphones and tablets.
WebXPRT 2015: link
While the previous three benchmarks do calculations in the background and represent a score, WebXPRT is designed to be a better interpretation of visual workloads that a professional user might have, such as browser based applications, graphing, image editing, sort/analysis, scientific analysis and financial tools.
Overall, all of our web benchmarks show a similar trend. Very few web frameworks offer multi-threading – the browsers themselves are barely multi-threaded at times – so Threadripper's vast thread count is underutilized. What wins the day on the web are a handful of fast cores with high single-threaded performance, and it becomes a balance between cores and cross-core communication.
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Gigaplex - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
How is Windows supposed to know when a specific app will run better with SMT enabled/disabled, NUMA, or even settings like SLI/Crossfire and PCIe lane distribution between peripheral cards? If your answer is app profiles based on benchmark testing, there's no way Microsoft will do that for all the near infinite configurations of hardware against all the Windows software out there. They've cut back on their own testing and fired most of their testing team. It's mostly customer beta testing instead.peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
Windows does not know whether it is a critical gaming thread or not. Setting thread affinity is not a rocket science - unless you are some Java "programmer".Spoelie - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
And anyone not writing directly in assembly should be shot on sight, right?peevee - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
You don't need to write in assembly to set thread affinities.Glock24 - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Seems like the 1800X is a better all around CPU. If you really need and can use more than 8C/16T then get TR.For mixed workloads of gaming and productivity the 1800X or any of the smaller siblings is a better choice.
msroadkill612 - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
The decision watershed is pcie3 lanes imo. Otherwise, the ryzen is a mighty advance in the mainstream sweet spot over ~6 months ago.OTH, I see lane hungry nvme ports as a boon to expanding a pcs abilities later. The premium for an 8 core TR & mobo over ryzen seems cost justifiable expandability.
Luckz - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
It seems that the 1800X has the NVIDIA spend less time doing weird stuff.franzeal - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
If you're going to reference Intel in your benchmark summaries (Rocket League is one place I noticed it), either include them or don't forget to edit them out of your copy/paste job.Luckz - Friday, August 18, 2017 - link
WCCFTech-Level writing, eh.franzeal - Thursday, August 17, 2017 - link
Again, as with the original article, the description for the Dolphin render benchmarks is incorrectly stating that the results are shown in minutes.