Benchmarks: Far Cry Primal, Hitman, Warhammer
Moving on we have Far Cry Primal which might seem like an odd choice given that it isn't a well optimized game for high core count CPUs, but it often delivers interesting results so I thought it was worth a look. Here we see when using the DDR4-2666 memory, the 7820X is 13% slower than the 6900K, but 8% faster than the R7 1700, at least when looking at the average frame rate performance.
The DDR4-3200 results show that faster memory increased the minimum frame rate for the 7820X by 5% while the R7 1700 enjoyed a 10% boost. The Ryzen CPU was now 8% faster when comparing the minimum frame rate and a few frames faster for the average.
After squeezing everything we could out of the 7820X, it saw an 11% leap in performance and overtook the R7 1700.
Hitman is another title where the older Core i7-6900K slays both the Ryzen 7 1700 and Core i7-7820X when matched clock-for-clock. The R7 1700 made out quite poorly with the DDR4-2666 memory this time, being 10% slower than the 7820X and 17% slower than the 6900K when comparing the minimum frame rate.
Increasing the memory speed to 3200 didn't do much for the 7820X and we've seen this several times already. The R7 1700, on the other hand, enjoyed a 13% jump in minimum frame rate and a 15% increase for the average, so it's not far behind the 7820X here.
Turning up the heat with the Core i7-7820X at 4.5GHz helped improve performance by a further 8%, placing it comfortable ahead of the R7 1700.
Finally we have Total War Warhammer and this is a title that has been well optimized to take advantage of Ryzen through to a few handy updates. As you can see even with DDR4-2666 memory Ryzen is able to lay waste to not just the 7820X but also the 6900K in this title. It's also worth noting that the Broadwell-E CPU was again faster than Intel's new 7820X, delivering an 8% greater minimum frame rate.
Upgrading to DDR4-3200 did improve the 7820X's minimum frame rate result by 10%, which is decent, but the R7 1700 saw a massive 16% performance bump here and stayed slightly ahead of the 7820X even when it was pushed to 4.5GHz and 3GHz mesh.