Benchmarks: 7-zip, Excel, Handbrake, Adobe Premiere, SoTR
7-zip compression performance is an issue for the 2990WX, at least when testing on Windows. Thus far this issue has not been addressed and therefore we see the 2920X just beating the 2990WX while it smashed the 2970WX. Still when it comes to file compression Intel does appear to have a reasonably significant performance advantage.
However when it comes to decompression the AMD processors come into their own. The 2990WX is a weapon here and the 2970WX is also mighty impressive, beating the 7980XE by a 29% margin.
The Microsoft Excel benchmark might be a bit redundant now as most of these high-end desktop CPUs take less than 2 seconds to complete the workload, but we have the results so why not include them. Intel does enjoy a slight performance advantage in this test but with the Monte Carlo Simulation being such an extreme workload I doubt anyone is ever going to notice Intel's performance advantage in this application.
Where you might notice Intel's performance advantage is when working with H.265 content, their superior AVX implementation can be seen here. AMD also have an issue with the Windows scheduler in this test which certainly doesn't help and it's the reason why the 12-core Threadripper CPUs are seen matching the 24 and 32-core models. AMD's 16-core 2950X is also to put up a decent fight but even then the 7960X is still 14% faster, though in terms of value it's still much worse.
Since reviewing the 2990WX, Adobe Premiere has seen a major update and with it performance of the 32-core processor has been much improved, though it's still slightly slower than the 16-core model, still it was considerably slower previously. The 2970WX basically matched the 2990WX and was therefore also slightly slower than the 2950X. Still while the 2950X offers the most bang for your buck of the higher-end Threadripper CPUs in Premiere, the 2970WX still stacks up well against the Intel competition as it was just 10% slower than the 7980XE.
The new 2920X also does well, though it is only 7% faster than the 1920X and at launch does cost considerably more. Still the 2920X was on par with the 9900K running hot without a TDP limit.
This is our mainstream Warp Stabilizer test running just a single iteration. I haven't had time to run our dozen simultaneous Warp Stabilizer test just yet but I will include that data in future content. Again the 2950X is the best Threadripper has to offer in Premiere while the higher-end 24-core and 32-core parts do lag behind.
Gaming
Don't freak out... but for now I've just managed to squeeze in a single game test for this review, the focus is on productivity but soon we will create an article more focused on gaming performance. Providing a sample of that work we have the Shadow of the Tomb Raider results, starting with the 1080p data and again I'm using the RTX 2080 Ti.
With the Dynamic Local Mode enabled for the 2990WX and 2970WX we still see sub-optimal frame time performance, though the average frame rate isn't bad. Here we see the 2920X and 2950X matching the frame time of the 2700X while beating it by a reasonable margin. I went back and re-tested the 2700X just to make sure there weren't any updates that improved performance but I got the same 93 fps on average in our test. So the 12 and 16-core Threadripper CPUs are offering a performance increase here over the 2700X which is most unexpected.
However once we move to 1440p the 2700X is now able to roughly match the average frame rate of the Threadripper CPUs while offering slightly better frame time performance, though overall performance was much the same between the 2920X, 2950X and 2700X. They were all comparable with the 9900K as we are mostly GPU bound here. Again even with Dynamic Local Mode enabled we were seeing some serious frame time issues with the 2970WX and 2990WX processors.
This persisted even at the extreme 4K resolution, as far as I could tell the Dynamic Local Mode was working but AMD has reported a few bugs with enabling it, hopefully those are sorted out with the public release which should be available now. Anyway as expected with the exception of the 24-core and 32-core models we're very much GPU bound at 4K and here the 2920X was able to get the most out of the RTX 2080 Ti.