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
— π·π. πΌππ πΆπ’π‘πππ π (@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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Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
Ah, we have an "enlightened centrist" here. No take is too worthless, malformed or ignorant for him. Anything less than subjecting yourself to the dribblings of fools and disinformation artists is an "echo chamber". Such rational, many smart.Ian Cutress - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
You do realise that not all of the benchmarks have to confirm to your use case?There are two roads to take:
1) Out of ABCXYZ, Benchmarks XYZ are relevant to me. That's good.
2) Out of ABCXYZ, only Benchmarks XYZ are relevant to me. Why did you even bother testing ABC?
Not 100% of benchmarks have to be relevant to you. Plenty of other folks have requested these.
Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Famrnuke - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I'm sorry, WHAT? Userbench? I'll assume you're joking, because that's a god-awful "benchmark". PCMark is fine, but they gave many gaming results, so actually they've done better work than a lazy PCMark result.They did 7zip/WinRAR, imaging editing, video encoding, and browser tests as well.
Exactly what would using PCMark and Userbench add?
PeterCollier - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
PCMark writing is a good test of system responsiveness.paulemannsen - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
Userbenchmark is so bad, it now gets ridiculed permanently and has become the Number 1 Meme in the community. PCMark measures, like you said yourself, SYSTEM-responsiveness, so its understandable if its not the top priority here. Furthermore, if you arent completely braindead you can extrapolate system-behaviour from a CPU-test/benchmark. Basically everything you spew here is demontrating your total ignorance and lack of knowledge of everything. You should be utterly ashamed of yourself.PeterCollier - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
Mind mentioning some facts when disparaging Userbenchmark?Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Facts! Okay:It has a known Intel bias, it doesn't actually do anything that isn't covered by the tests shown here, and even if it did *some of us would still be happier with these real-world application benchmarks*.
PeterCollier - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Got some links?Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
Sure, here's one that's relevant to you:http://wondermark.com/1k62/