Testing, testing

The method to the madness

It’s a new era for the PC. After years of dominance, Intel finally has a real fight on its hands in the f orm of AMD’s new Ryzen processor, based on its Zen architecture. As you’ll see, we’re rather excited about this chip, especially if you do more than just game on your PC. However, our review is bound to spark a bit of controversy, as our gaming tests don’t show it to be quite as impressive as hoped.

This is because I always test CPUs in games with the GPU minimised as a bottleneck. This means testing at low resolution, and disabling GPUdependent features such as anti-aliasing and shader effects. On the flipside, I crank up the settings that push the CPU to its limit – things that maximise the draw calls and polygons in each scene, such as draw distance and object detail. Now, some might argue that this doesn’t recreate the real world performance of an overall system, but that’s not our thinking here at PCPP. When testing a component, I want to limit every other bottleneck in the system so that I can measure the true performance of that component – not the system as a whole. This is wh y I use the fastest CPU possible when testing GPUs, or the fastest motherboard when testing SSDs. It’s all well and good to see how a game runs at 1080p, but that doesn ’t indicate what happens when the CPU is the limiting factor, and isn’t a true one- to-one comparison when measuring CPUs against each other.

Having said that, I’m going to re-examine our benchmarks in the near future. They’re getting a little long in the tooth, and I think it’s probably worth doing a bit more testing in real world scenarios. Mainly because this will clear up the confusion some readers may have as to why I test the way I do, but also to start testing more DX12 titles and games with more advanced graphical features/demanding performance. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, so feel free to drop me a line at bennettring@hotmail.com with your suggestions. In the meantime, welcome to the reignition of the CPU fire. Thanks AMD – it may have taken you a while to get your CPUs back in form, but the wait has been worth it. And as we see more games make use of multiple cores, the story is only going to get even better for Ryzen’s multi-cored design.