AUGUST 2019 PCWorld 37available, the Ryzen 9 sprints past to the Core
i9 by a whopping 46 percent.
While the Core i9 has a single-digit
advantage in single-threaded tasks, we have
to say the Ryzen 9 is so close it doesn’t
matter. When you open it up to all cores—it’s
an epic beating.
GAMING PERFORMANCE
It’s pretty much been all sunshine and roses
for the Ryzen 9 3900X so far. The final
question is its gaming performance. Ever
since the original Ryzen 7 1800X launch,
gaming, especially at lower resolutions where
the game isn’t bottlenecked by the GPU, has
been nothing but controversy. It’s also been
the one shining area for Intel.
As we said earlier, for our tests, we used
GeForce GTX 1080 FE cards and also RTX 2080
Ti cards. We did our primary testing at 1920 x
1080 resolution and also tested at 2560 x 1440.
To save you space, we pretty much omitted the
results at 2560 x 1440 resolution because, well,
you don’t want to look at a bunch of results
where they’re all nearly the same. Even in tests
where the Ryzen 7 2700X might fall behind, it’s
not really that big of a deal.
We also wanted to mention that during
our tests two games we used, Deus Ex:
Mankind Divided and Far Cry 5 stopped
working. Why? With modern copy protection
schemes, launching and authenticating the
games apparently have a limit, and we seem
to have hit the limit of our licensed games.
First up is Shadows of the Tomb Raider,
which we run on the GeForce GTX 1080 FE
card using the Highest Quality setting. As you
can see, it’s a tie! Win, right? Well, not really.
The real issue is using the Highest Quality
setting is enough to make the now ancient
GeForce GTX 1080 FE seem downright slow.
It’s the bottleneck with these CPUs.
You can see why the minute we swap in the
mean, lean GeForce RTX 2080 Ti FE: The RyzenDecompressing is traditionally greatly limited by
integer performance and how good a CPU can
handle branch misprediction.
Ryzen 9 3900X
Zen 2 (12/24)
Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake R (8/16)Ryzen 7 2700X
Zen+ (8/16)7-Zip 19.00
Decompressing nT (MIPS)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE135,97185,47480,451In integer performance, the results indicate single-
threaded performance is nearly a tie between all
three, with the Core i9 squeaking out ahead.
Ryzen 9 3900X
Zen 2 (12/24)
Core i9-9900K Coffee Lake R (8/16)Ryzen 7 2700X
Zen+ (8/16)7-Zip 19.00
Decompressing 1T (MIPS)LONGER BARS INDICATE BETTER PERFORMANCE8,5048,9918,661