Gaming Performance
Now it's time to do some gaming and first up we have Ashes of the Singularity running on the DX12 API. The Ryzen GPUs would fair a lot better in this title with a Radeon GPU as we've shown a number of times in the past, unfortunately right now AMD doesn't have anything competitive in the high-end so it makes sense to test with a GTX 1080 Ti.
In any case the Ryzen 5 2600 is still respectable and overclocked edges out the stock 7700K and 7800X, it's also not a great deal slower than the 8-core 1800X and 2700X.
Moving to Assassin's Creed Origins using the ultra quality preset and we see that the 2600 it only slightly faster than the 1600 out of the box. That said unlike the 1600 it does see a decent performance bump once overclocked, though something limits the AMD CPUs to around 98 fps in this title, could it be the Nvidia display driver? I'm not sure on that one but I'll look into it soon.
Dropping down to the high quality settings we see a similar performance limitation for the AMD CPUs, this time capping them at around 107-110 fps, where as the Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake CPUs are good for over 115 fps though here they appear to find the limits of the GTX 1080 Ti.
Overclocked the Ryzen 5 2600 is able to roughly match the Ryzen 7 2700X and that meant it was 8% faster than the 1600 maxed out at 4 GHz. So a decent step forward here for AMD at the $200 price point.
Reducing the GPU bottleneck with the medium quality settings does allow the overclocked 8700K and 8600K to run away with it but still even before we overclock the 2600 it allowed for over 100 fps at all times in our test.
Playing Far Cry 5 the overclocked 2600 basically matched the overclocked 2700X and this made it one of the fastest Ryzen CPUs we've ever tested in this title. Although it does trail the Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake CPUs with 100 fps or more it's still getting the job done nicely.
Interesting the 6-core Ryzen CPUs do lag behind a little for the 1% low result in our 12-player Overwatch bot test and while overclocking the 2600 does help it still can't reach the frame cap.
Moving on the Vermintide 2 and here we see that with the extreme quality preset at 1080p the Ryzen 5 2600 can almost get the most out of the GTX 1080 Ti. Overclocked it was just 11% slower than the 8700K and 8600K, both of which were clocked at 5.2 GHz.
Reducing the GPU bottleneck with the medium quality prest does once again allow the Intel CPUs to run away with it making them a better choice for high refresh rate gaming as I've noted in the past.