Ghost Recon Wildlands, Ashes of the Singularity, Civilization VI
The last of the DirectX 11 titles tested is Ghost Recon Wildlands and here we again see competitive performance for the most part. Interestingly, with Vega 64 running at 1080p we saw the R5 1600 struggle quite a bit, significantly more than the 7700K. Meanwhile, with the GTX 1080 installed the R5 1600 is competitive with the 7700K.
Increasing the resolution to 1440p we see the R5 1600 struggling with Vega 64, again the 1% low result is particularly troubling. Using the GTX 1080 though we see that Ryzen is indeed now competitive.
Ashes of the Singularity was tested using DirectX 12 and no I haven't had time to explore how the game behaves with Vulkan yet. Anyway, using DX12 we do see some interesting things.
First, at 1080p we are mostly CPU limited I'd say. The 7700K and R5 1600 appear evenly matched under heavy usage scenarios in games as they can be seen delivering similar performance.
Moving to 1440p load begins to shift more towards the GPU but we do see something of note. The R5 1600 and its many threads is still able to get the most out of the Vega 64 GPU and is now quite a bit faster than the GTX 1080. This is also seen when using the GTX 1080, though to a much lesser degree. Vega's superior DX12 support is certainly allowing Ryzen to shine here, at least this is my interpretation of the results.
What was just seen when testing with Ashes of the Singularity is somewhat amplified in Civilization VI. Vega's superior DX12 support appears hampered by the Core i7-7700K's limited cores and as a result Vega 64 is actually seen to be slower than the GTX 1080 at 1080p.
However, throw both the GTX 1080 and Vega 64 graphics cards on the Ryzen 5 1600 and we find a different story. The GTX 1080 is capable of basically the same numbers we saw when testing with the 7700K. However, Vega 64 is now 15% faster for the average frame rate and a whopping 21% faster for the 1% low result.
This massive boost in frame rate can even be seen at 1440p as the R5 1600 allows Vega 64 to push well beyond 60 fps at all times, impressive stuff indeed.