This post is an editorial. We are including new benchmark results, which should theoretically give you something new to discuss, but pleaseee take it with a grain of salt, as there’s simply not enough data to make any final judgments.

Let’s start with a list of all AMD Ryzen CPUs compared to Intel’s current offering based on available information.

Desktop Processors Model Cores Threads Base Clock Turbo Clock TDP Chinese Price (Yuans) Intel Broadwell-E & Kabylake CPUs Core i7 6950X 10C 20T 3000 MHz 3500 MHz 140W 14999 Core i7 6900K 8C 16T 3200 MHz 3700 MHz 140W 8199 Core i7 6850K 6C 12T 3600 MHz 3800 MHz 140W 4799 Core i7 6800K 6C 12T 3400 MHz 3600 MHz 140W 3399 Core i7 7700K 4C 8T 4200 MHz 4500 MHz 91W 2799 Core i7 7700 4C 8T 3600 MHz 4200 MHz 65W 2499 Core i5 7600K 4C 4T 3800 MHz 4200 MHz 91W 1899 Core i5 7500 4C 4T 3400 MHz 3800 MHz 65W 1579 Core i3 7350K 2C 4T 4200 MHz – 60W 1399 AMD Ryzen CPUs Ryzen 7 1800X 8C 16T 3600 MHz 4000 MHz 95W+ 4399 Ryzen 7 1700X 8C 16T 3400 MHz 3800 MHz 95W+ 3199 Ryzen 7 1700 8C 16T 3000 MHz 3700 MHz 65W 2599 Ryzen 5 1600X 6C 12T 3300 MHz 3700 MHz 95W+ 1999 Ryzen 5 1500 6C 12T 3200 MHz 3400 MHz 65W 1799 Ryzen 5 1400X 4C 8T 3500 MHz 3900 MHz 65W 1599 Ryzen 5 1300 4C 8T 3300 MHz 3600 MHz 65W 1399 Ryzen 3 1200X 4C 4T 3400 MHz 3800 MHz 65W 1199 Ryzen 3 1100 4C 4T 3200 MHz 3500 MHz 65W 999

AMD Ryzen 3DMark Physics

Okay here’s what you were asking for, but first we need to explain what are we showing here. What’s 3DMark Physics score? Physics score is the reason why we never use Overall 3DMark scores, simply because this value is (obviously) only calculated on the CPU, which is kind of useless when benchmarking GPUs. But if we were to benchmark only CPUs, Physics score suddenly becames interesting. The Fire Strike test is really heavy on GPU and CPU. The physics part is very CPU intense and it scales nicely with more cores. But who would explain this better than the 3DMark authors themselves:

Physics test

3DMark Fire Strike Physics test benchmarks the hardware’s ability to run gameplay physics simulations on the CPU. The GPU load is kept as low as possible to ensure that only the CPU is stressed. The Bullet Open Source Physics Library is used as the physics library for the test.

The test has 32 simulated worlds. One thread per available CPU core is used to run simulations. All physics are computed on CPU with soft body vertex data updated to GPU each frame.

So basically more cores = better performance, but it also matters how fast each core is.

First, we need data for comparison. We could use the official list from Futuremark, which actually shows slightly lower values than what reviewers can achieve, or we could use a review from Tom’s Hardware #link1 #link2.

Legend:

AMD Ryzen: ZD3406BAM88F4_38/34_Y — Eight-Core CPU

AMD Ryzen: ZD3301BBM6IF4_37/33_Y — Six-Core CPU

AMD Ryzen: ZD3201BBM4KF4_34/32_Y — Quad-Core CPU

I think the next chart is far my important. Notice how close all Ryzen CPUs are to each other if we take single-thread performance. Kabylake CPUs really are doing better here, but since Ryzen offers more cores, that difference suddenly becomes unimportant.

The lesson from this is simple. We can finally start benchmarking GPUs with Ryzen.