Gaming
These three games, all run at 1440p and with decent quality settings, offer a mixed picture.
It doesn't matter which CPU powers the machine for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The benchmark is so GPU limited at 1440p ultra settings on a GeForce GTX 1080 that you could throw a blanket over the CPUs.
Hitman shows evidence of CPU scaling. One needs four cores to get the most out of the GTX 1080, and while Ryzen 7 1800X is behind a cohort of Intel chips, it's naturally far closer to the blue team than any previous AMD chip.
Total War: Warhammer is the one title that causes us some pause for thought. It's known to be driven by solid CPU performance, so seeing the Ryzen 7 1800X a fair bit behind a quartet of Intel chips, to the tune of 10fps, is not encouraging. Understanding that the AMD and Intel architectures are more similar than ever before, we're not sure how much of this gap can be bridged by forthcoming game optimisations.
However, and somewhat interesting to note, switching off the chip's SMT capability increased the average frame rate from 79fps to 85.8fps, suggesting that code is not running efficiently when there's SMT involved. Hopefully this problem will be fixed by a game-patch update.
Going back to SMT, switching it off also increases the Hitman score, from 91.4fps to 95.6fps, suggesting, once again, that having it active is definitely hindering performance. In fact, running Ryzen in non-SMT mode offers more performance in every scenario, and this is something that AMD needs to be concerned about.
