StarCraft II, The Division, The Witcher 3, Titanfall 2, Vermintide 2
StarCraft II is another title that's always heavily requested and it's a game that I personally really enjoy. However I often refrain from using it because although the game itself is of excellent quality, the game engine is dated and makes extremely poor use of modern hardware, modern as in decade old hardware. For whatever reason it's never been updated to use more than a single thread and for this reason Ryzen has traditionally struggled in this title.
However out of the box the Ryzen 5 2600 wasn't that bad and once overclocked it actually beat the Core i5-8400. This three resolution test with the GTX 1080 Ti though shows us just how incredibly CPU bound the game is and again this is because it uses just a single core.
Unlike Starcraft II, The Division isn't limited to a single CPU core but we are still hardware limited, this time GPU limited. This is a very GPU bound title and here we see all three test configurations delivering similar results even at 720p.
I went back and double checked the The Witcher 3 results because the frame time performance for the Core i5-8400 looks weaker than expected. The results though are accurate and it seems a bit part of the issue here for the Core i5 processor is the memory speed. Switching to a Z370 board with DDR4-3200 memory boosted the frame time performance at 15% to 93 fps and while this still placed the 8400 behind Ryzen the margin isn't nearly as extreme.
I have to say overall the experience was noticeably smoother with Ryzen in this title and for those wondering we always benchmark The Witcher 3 in the town of Novigrad. Even at 1440p the Ryzen 5 2600 enjoys a noticeable advantage in this title, so overall a great result for AMD here.
Titanfall 2 is a mostly GPU limited title and low resolution testing can't be used to get around this as it has a hard frame cap. The 144 fps limit neutralizes performance for the most part at 720p and 1080p and then once we get to 1440p we're heavily GPU bound so there isn't much to report here.
The stock Ryzen 5 2600 actually outclassed the Core i5-8400 in Vermintide 2 and it maintained its performance advantage even at 1440p. That said overclocking was of no benefit here but it did provide up to 13% greater performance at 720p.