AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2920X And 2970WX Review: Lower Cost, Many Core Beasts

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics Taking the GPU out of the Equation

The 3DMark Physics benchmark doesn't like the latency impact of the 2970WX's default NUMA memory configuration, and the processor's relatively low clocks hold it back as well. DLM and running the processor in 1/2 core legacy compatibility mode helps, but it finishes well behind the fastest processors here. The 2920X fares better because of its higher clock and local memory attached to both dies.

High Resolution Gaming And Graphics Tests 1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on our test rigs 3DMark, Middle Earth: Shadow Of War and Rise Of The Tomb Raider. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme preset, and both of the games were run in two different configurations -- either 1080p with Medium details, or 4K with High/Very High details. The lower resolution tests are more CPU bound, while the higher resolution tests are more GPU bound.

Our 1080p game tests had some quizzical results we still have to dig into. The Threadripper 2970WX performed well in Shadow Of War, especially with DLM enabled. DLM, however, causes the lowest result of the bunch in Tomb Raider. Regardless, every configuration is plenty fast here.

Cranking the resolution up to 4K levels the playing field considerably, as the bottleneck moves almost exclusively to the GPU.


3DMark Fire Strike has the Threadripper 2920X finishing about in the middle of the pack. The Threadripper 2970WX technically trails most of the other configurations we tested here, but the deltas separating the platforms in this GPU-centric benchmark are relatively small.