MARCH 2020 PCWorld 31LINUS TECH TIPS RUNS
CRYSIS ON THREADRIPPER
3990X
But can it run Crysis?! Glad you asked. Besides
showing the chip easily ripping through
rendering tests, Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips
shows the CPU is actually capable of running
Crysis (go.pcworld.com/lnst). And no, we don’t
mean running Crysis on a GPU in the system with
Threadripper 3990X, we mean, actually running
Crysis rendered in software mode ON THE CPU.
It’s an amazing feat worth watching.
Sebastian does point out the odd position
AMD occupies at the moment. Yes,
Threadripper 3990X eats Xeons for breakfast in
compute, but he notes that AMD is now at the
point where it has put artificial limitations on the
3990X so as not to compete with its own Epyc
server chips, which support much higher RAM
capacities than Threadripper does. In
Sebastian’s eyes, the new chip is a “$4,000
deadend” due to its “low” memory limit of
256GB. That’s a mere quarter of what Intel’s
Xeon W-3175X can take, he points out.PHORONIX: WHAT ABOUT
LINUX ON THREADRIPPER
3990X?
We’ll close off our review roundup by
satiating Linux fans, who are all screaming,
“It’s Windows’ fault!”
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel (go.pcworld.
com/phrn) writes that the “AMD Ryzen
Threadripper 3990X Offers Incredible Linux
Performance.”
Larabel continued: “When taking the
geometric mean of the benchmarks for this
article today, The Threadripper 3990X came out
overall 26% faster than the dual Xeon Platinum
8280, which is a very nice accomplishment
since such a configuration currently retails for
$20,000 USD worth of processors alone. For
those doing serious content creation work like
Blender or other CPU-based renderers/
modeling, engaging in heavy
multi-threaded workloads that
aren’t memory intensive
(where instead you’d be
better off with the EPYC 7002
CPUs with eight-channel
memory), or code
compilation of large software
projects, the AMD Ryzen
Threadripper 3990X is a
mighty impressive
competitor.”Can it run Crysis?! Yes, in fact Linus Tech Tips used the 64-core
Threadripper 3990X to do just that. And no, not on the GPU: The game
ran rendered in software on Threadripper.