PCWorld – August 2019

AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 41

Deus Ex: Machina, which gave the Core i9
about a 7-percent lead over the Ryzen 9. (Yes,
the copy protection for Deus Ex gave up the
ghost during our test runs too, so the Ryzen 7
2700X was not tested with the RTX card.)
We ran the popular game Rainbow Six
Siege with similar results. Sure, Ryzen 9 is in
second place, but not by much. Compare its
results to the Ryzen 7 2700X.
If we had to call a victor based solely on
gaming, we’d give it to the Core i9. But the
slim victory makes it hardly a victory at all,
because even the Core i9’s wins are by such
small margins—certainly far smaller than
against any older Zen or Zen+ CPU. And we
have to move all the way to a $1,200 graphics
card to see the separation. We really think
anything below an RTX 2080 will likely make it
nearly impossible to tell the difference
between the two CPUs at 1920 x 1080.

BOTTOM LINE
To close off our review, we like to run Cinebench

using from 1 thread to 24 threads. Cinebench

R20 is a 3D modeling benchmark that doesn’t

predict gaming performance or other application

performance, but a lot of games and applications

just can’t take advantage of all the threads in

modern CPUs. That’s why Cinebench R20 has

value in demonstrating performance when the

CPU is loaded up from 1 thread and up.

On the chart to the right, AMD typically

dominates the right side of the chart, where it

almost always has an advantage in the number

of cores over Intel chips.

Intel, on the other hand, typically loses on

the right side but wins on the left side, because

it usually has a clock speed and IPC advantage

over AMD chips. That’s basically given Intel’s

Core chips their only edge, because the vast

majority of applications and games rely on

performance on the left side of our chart. Well, if

you look at our chart today between the Ryzen 9

3900X and the Core i9-9900K, that last reason

is essentially gone now.

For another view of the same data, we’ve

Ryzen 9 3900X Zen 2 (12/24)

Core i9-9900K Cofee

Lake R (8/16)

Ryzen 7 2700X Zen+

(8/16)

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

DX12, Crazy, CPU Focused, GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE (Fps)

LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE

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The CPU Focused Test in Ashes is indeed a CPU test, because we barely saw frame rates budge going from a
GeForce GTX 1080 to GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.