Gaming Performance
Testing games is where things tend to get tricky.
In Battlefield 1, the 1800X and 1600X fall short of the 7600K's 153fps average, but if we look at the minimum frame rates they're both faster than the 7600K. In fact, when comparing minimum results, the 1800X matched the 6900K while the 1500X was just 4% slower.
The 1500X on the other hand loses out to the Core i5-7500 in both the minimum and average frame rates, though it's still possible to overclock the 1500X for greater performance and we will explore this later in the review.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was tested using the DX11 API at 1080p with the high quality preset. Here the 1600X matches the performance of the 1800X though unfortunately both are slower than the 7600K by almost 10% when comparing the minimum frame rate.
That said, the 1500X makes out quite a bit better, beating the locked 7500 by a slim margin.
The DX11 Hitman results are quite competitive for the 1600X and 1500X which is great as the 1800X doesn't fare that well against the 7700K or 6900K, at least when looking at the average frame rate, though I should note the minimum result is good. Moving on, the 1600X roughly matched the 7600K while the 1500X was a good bit faster than the 7500 – a great result for the 1500X here.
The plan was to include Mafia III to showcase how well Ryzen can perform in some games. Previously this was a title where the Ryzen 7 processors did well, even beating the 7700K under certain conditions. However, this retest shows the 1800X quite a long way behind the 7700K.
Something has changed with this title. The 1800X has taken a big hit, particularly to the minimum frame rate and the same is also true for the 6900K. Conversely, the 7700K has gained a few extra frames, so it seems some optimization might have been done to make this title less demanding on the CPU. This could also be down to improvements made by the Nvidia display driver.
I believe the game was patched last week but there was no mention of any performance changes. The Nvidia driver has also been heavily updated since they previous testing was conducted but the improvements mostly focused on DX12 performance.
I expected the 1600X to easily beat the 7600K here and the 1500X demolish the 7500. Instead, performance is competitive among these processors and again something has changed here.
Moving to Ashes of the Singularity we see that the 1800X is able to close in on the 7700K for the normal batch test, that said it does slip away in the heavy batch test.
The new Ryzen 5 models look rather competitive when comparing the 1600X to the 7600K and the 1500X against the 7500. The latter chips are separated by almost 10% in the normal batch test – yet another strong result for AMD's affordable quad-core CPU.