The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 7, 2020 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: New Tests!
As part of our ever on-going march towards a better rounded view of the performance of these processors, we have a few new tests for you that we’ve been cooking in the lab. Some of these new benchmarks provide obvious talking points, others are just a bit of fun. Most of them are so new we’ve only run them on a few processors so far. It will be interesting to hear your feedback!
NAMD ApoA1
One frequent request over the years has been for some form of molecular dynamics simulation. Molecular dynamics forms the basis of a lot of computational biology and chemistry when modeling specific molecules, enabling researchers to find low energy configurations or potential active binding sites, especially when looking at larger proteins. We’re using the NAMD software here, or Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics, often cited for its parallel efficiency. Unfortunately the version we’re using is limited to 64 threads on Windows, but we can still use it to analyze our processors. We’re simulating the ApoA1 protein for 10 minutes, and reporting back the ‘nanoseconds per day’ that our processor can simulate. Molecular dynamics is so complex that yes, you can spend a day simply calculating a nanosecond of molecular movement.
Crysis CPU Render
One of the most oft used memes in computer gaming is ‘Can It Run Crysis?’. The original 2007 game, built in the Crytek engine by Crytek, was heralded as a computationally complex title for the hardware at the time and several years after, suggesting that a user needed graphics hardware from the future in order to run it. Fast forward over a decade, and the game runs fairly easily on modern GPUs, but we can also apply the same concept to pure CPU rendering – can the CPU render Crysis? Since 64 core processors entered the market, one can dream. We built a benchmark to see whether the hardware can.
Smooth#canitruncrysis pic.twitter.com/k7x31ULndF
— ๐ท๐. ๐ผ๐๐ ๐ถ๐ข๐ก๐๐๐ ๐ (@IanCutress) May 4, 2020
For this test, we’re running Crysis’ own GPU benchmark, but in CPU render mode. This is a 2000 frame test, which we run over a series of resolutions from 800x600 up to 1920x1080.
Crysis CPU Render Frames Per Second |
||||||
AnandTech | 800 x600 |
1024 x768 |
1280 x800 |
1366 x768 |
1600 x900 |
1920 x1080 |
AMD | ||||||
Ryzen 9 4900HS | 11.50 | 8.75 | 7.44 | 6.83 | 5.21 | 4.30 |
Ryzen 5 3600 | 9.98 | 7.84 | 6.69 | 6.15 | 4.75 | 3.92 |
Ryzen 3 3300X | 8.42 | 6.52 | 5.43 | 5.01 | 3.92 | 3.07 |
Ryzen 3 3100 | 7.50 | 5.78 | 4.87 | 4.5 | 3.54 | 2.77 |
Intel | ||||||
Core i7-7700K | 7.63 | 5.87 | 4.95 | 4.55 | 3.57 | 2.79 |
Core i7-9750H | 6.78 | 5.17 | 4.37 | 3.99 | 3.12 | 2.46 |
Dwarf Fortress
Another long standing request for our benchmark suite has been Dwarf Fortress, a popular management/roguelike indie video game, first launched in 2006. Emulating the ASCII interfaces of old, this title is a rather complex beast, which can generate environments subject to millennia of rule, famous faces, peasants, and key historical figures and events. The further you get into the game, depending on the size of the world, the slower it becomes.
DFMark is a benchmark built by vorsgren on the Bay12Forums that gives two different modes built on DFHack: world generation and embark. These tests can be configured, but range anywhere from 3 minutes to several hours. I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but after analyzing the test, we ended up going for three different world generation sizes.
Interestingly Intel's hardware likes Dwarf Fortress.
We also have other benchmarks in the wings, such as AI Benchmark (ETH), LINPACK, and V-Ray, however they still require a bit of tweaking to get working it seems.
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paulemannsen - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
@schujj07 Interesting. Your claim sounds totally alien to me, so can you show us some examples where a CPU is significantly slower in 1080p than in 720p when the GPU isnt the bottleneck pls?schujj07 - Sunday, May 10, 2020 - link
Just look at this review and there are a couple examples of this a 720p and 1080p ultra.Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
@superdawgwtfd - If the resolution is too low then you artificially amplify the differences between CPUs. Meanwhile at 1080p you're testing a resolution people will acttually use for high-frame-rate displays, and a decent GPU is still not going to be the primary limit at that resolution.Fataliity - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
Also a 7700K should be similar to the new 10th gens with same amount of cores. It's same arch / node. Just frequency changes (and I think the low end new ones are saame or slightly lower.Ian Cutress - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
7700K was tested last year on the same driver sets. It's been in Bench for a whileschujj07 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
The 9100F is 4c/4t with a 3.6/4.2 clock. The 7700k is 4c/8t with a 4.2/4.5 clock. Since both the 7th & 9th gen are both Sky Lake, they will have identical IPC. Based on that we know that the 9100F will perform worse than the 7700k and makes that inclusion pretty pointless. Not to mention that Ian said he never got review samples of the 9th gen i3's. In a lot of the benchmarks we see the R5 1600 & 2600 and the 1600AF will be right between those 2 CPUs in performance. The inclusion of the 4790k and 8086k are nice as they show comparisons from the top 2014 CPU and 2018 CPU. When it comes to single threaded applications, a stock 8086k will be as fast than as a stock 9900k due to having the same boost and IPC. Therefore we are able to extrapolate a lot of data from this whole thing.Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
You made a succession of excellent points here. Alas, I feel some people would rather use their brain for trolling than for processing the information they claim to want in the course of said trolling.crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
1600AF performance is identical to the 2600, so just use that.3600 is an unfortunate omission.
schujj07 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
Due to the clock differences between the 2 CPUs that is false. The 1600AF will fall between the 1600 & 2600 in performance.crimson117 - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
You're right, not identical, but like 95% the performance at worst and often exactly the same in practice (especially gaming above 1080p): https://www.techspot.com/review/1977-amd-ryzen-160...