GPU Ray Tracing Performance Comparisons [2021-2022]

I see. So Gotham knights example that Alex showed as having bad CPU utilization may not be something that could have even been helped...
btw Gotham Knighst issues have been fixed. Loved that game, I put almost 40 hours into it till completion. I played the game at 60fps most of those hours with XeSS quality enabled, and the all over the place framerate of the initial release -which I suffered for one day, then a patch was released- is a thing of the past. There were stutters at times, but not crazy ones like going from 60 fps to 35fps, just 2-3 fps. The max framerate I got with the 3700X in that game was 90fps.
 
do you use stock settings? I decided to undervolt the 3700X to 1.0875V and lock it to 4GHz. I did this to avoid the huge and sudden temp spikes and crazy fan spinning. I loved the first Ryzen CPUs and the Zen 3 generation, but both Ryzen had the same issue. Nowadays, alas, I wouldn't recommend a Ryzen to anyone. It's just that Intel has better gaming -and overall- CPUs, imho. I am still happy with the 3700X though, it was a very nice CPU at the time and still kicking.

Zen2 was 'meh', Zen3 was kinda nice, great even. Intel is the better choice against any of those.... Not just gaming, but in special if you care about other tasks like the creator market.
Im also still on a Zen2 platform (3900x), its very capable on its own, however intel's offerings are superior in just about every way.
 
Zen2 was 'meh', Zen3 was kinda nice, great even. Intel is the better choice against any of those.... Not just gaming, but in special if you care about other tasks like the creator market.
Im also still on a Zen2 platform (3900x), its very capable on its own, however intel's offerings are superior in just about every way.
I realised I wrote Zen 3 instead of Zen 2 after reading your post nvm.
 
If I understand well Zen 4 aren't bad on the performance side but consume lot of power and need to change the motherboard no AM4 support and they aren't compatible with DDR4. They aren't expensive alone but adding changing motherboard and RAM, this is some expansive CPU. Is this correct?
 
do you use stock settings? I decided to undervolt the 3700X to 1.0875V and lock it to 4GHz. I did this to avoid the huge and sudden temp spikes and crazy fan spinning. I loved the first Ryzen CPUs and the Zen 2 generation, but both Ryzen had the same issue. Nowadays, alas, I wouldn't recommend a Ryzen to anyone. It's just that Intel has better gaming -and overall- CPUs, imho. I am still happy with the 3700X though, it was a very nice CPU at the time and still kicking.
Its stock atm but those spikes also annoy me so I'll have to work out how to do what you've done.
 
Zen2 was 'meh', Zen3 was kinda nice, great even. Intel is the better choice against any of those.... Not just gaming, but in special if you care about other tasks like the creator market.
Im also still on a Zen2 platform (3900x), its very capable on its own, however intel's offerings are superior in just about every way.
Zen 3 was certainly better than anything Intel pre-Alder Lake--it had a solid year of being top-dog.
 
do you use stock settings? I decided to undervolt the 3700X to 1.0875V and lock it to 4GHz. I did this to avoid the huge and sudden temp spikes and crazy fan spinning. I loved the first Ryzen CPUs and the Zen 2 generation, but both Ryzen had the same issue. Nowadays, alas, I wouldn't recommend a Ryzen to anyone. It's just that Intel has better gaming -and overall- CPUs, imho. I am still happy with the 3700X though, it was a very nice CPU at the time and still kicking.
What CPU cooler do you use?

I had a Arctic cooling 34 eSports on my R5 3600 with a custom fan curve and desktop browsing was silent and while gaming the CPU fan was barely audible regardless of the what the CPU was doing.

I would expect any decent cooler to not have any drastic temperature spikes.
 
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AMD's CPUs, due to a variety of factors, change power/clock states much more in lower intensity workloads which causes the the above described issue. If you have a relatively larger heatsink and/or use more constant fan curve (either constant speed or more tuned hysteresis) you can address the issue.

If I understand well Zen 4 aren't bad on the performance side but consume lot of power and need to change the motherboard no AM4 support and they aren't compatible with DDR4. They aren't expensive alone but adding changing motherboard and RAM, this is some expansive CPU. Is this correct?

Zen 4 requires an AM5 motherboard and DDR5. The CPUs prices themselves due to current sales and upcoming cheaper SKUs (7600, 7700, 7900) as effective price cuts are actually competitive in a vacuum. The issue is overall platform costs as AM5 and DDR5 carry a premium over AM4/LGA1700 options and DDR4. To be fair there is a future proofing argument (AM5 and DDR5 longevity) that gets used as a counter but there's a lot of caveats and other considerations as to whether or not that actually is beneficial.

As for whether or not they consume more power that's a bit of dependent on perspective. Zen 4 is more efficient than Zen 3 across the board at the same power states and more efficient than Raptor Lake at heavy workloads at lower power limits (relatively). In terms of absolute power consumption you'd need to set more parameters such as which SKUs you are comparing and normalize for factors such as exactly what power limit the motherboard is using.

I'm just going to say in general the idea of just running something like CB MT and comparing power used is not a very relevant measurement unless you're actual usage case is also running CB MT (or some render workload). However that, or somewhat equivalent tests, are what get plastered all over and it causes large misconception with respect to CPU power consumption. How much power your CPU will use in practice is much more complex to actually capture than say for a gaming GPU.
 
What CPU cooler do you use?

I had a Arctic cooling 34 eSports on my R5 3600 with a custom fan curve and desktop browsing was silent and while gaming the CPU fan was barely audible regardless of the what the CPU was doing.

I would expect any decent cooler to not have any drastic temperature spikes.
stock. I am talking from memory,maybe I am confusing the temps with something else, but what I mean is that the CPU fan goes from very quiet to noisy in a jiffy and back again to very silent. I set the voltage to 1.0875 and locked the CPU to 4.0GHz, a lot of time ago and that never happened again ever since.
 
stock. I am talking from memory,maybe I am confusing the temps with something else, but what I mean is that the CPU fan goes from very quiet to noisy in a jiffy and back again to very silent. I set the voltage to 1.0875 and locked the CPU to 4.0GHz, a lot of time ago and that never happened again ever since.

That's any stock cooler to be honest as they can get and do get loud.

But it's xmas soon, treat yourself to a nice CPU cooler and get lower nice and higher clocks :D
 
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stock. I am talking from memory,maybe I am confusing the temps with something else, but what I mean is that the CPU fan goes from very quiet to noisy in a jiffy and back again to very silent. I set the voltage to 1.0875 and locked the CPU to 4.0GHz, a lot of time ago and that never happened again ever since.

I might just try a flat fan profile like @arandomguy suggested above and see what happens.

If temps stay fine under heavy load then happy days.
 
I might just try a flat fan profile like @arandomguy suggested above and see what happens.

If temps stay fine under heavy load then happy days.
I had the issue of fans constantly changing rpm as my cpu bounced around temps, my solution was an option in the bios (I can't remember what it was called off hand) but it let you set a delay on fan speed changes. So when the cpu bursts frequency/heat the fans wont actually speed up or slowdown for a few seconds. It let me keep my fan curve that went from like 500rpm to 2300rpm without the fans constantly changing speed and the god aweful noise that made.
 
I had the issue of fans constantly changing rpm as my cpu bounced around temps, my solution was an option in the bios (I can't remember what it was called off hand) but it let you set a delay on fan speed changes. So when the cpu bursts frequency/heat the fans wont actually speed up or slowdown for a few seconds. It let me keep my fan curve that went from like 500rpm to 2300rpm without the fans constantly changing speed and the god aweful noise that made.

That's a great idea and I think I know the setting you mean. I'll definitely try that, thanks!

I did try the flat profile last night with CPU fan set to 30% (near silent) and the rest of my fans set similarly quiet but in just a few minutes of gaming the CPU was reading into the 80's so that's a no go.
 
That's a great idea and I think I know the setting you mean. I'll definitely try that, thanks!

I did try the flat profile last night with CPU fan set to 30% (near silent) and the rest of my fans set similarly quiet but in just a few minutes of gaming the CPU was reading into the 80's so that's a no go.

The contant fan speed method is really going to have to depend on your noise floor tolerance and/or heatsink side. This method typically really only works for people who do have relatively high noise floor tolerances. You'd basically have to, as you noticed, set your fan speed to what can handle your most used high load scenario (in this case gaming) which I guess would result in a noise floor higher than you like.

Hysteresis is the other option (and also what the other person is referring to) combined with a more relaxed fan curve on the lower temperature.

Also it's a bit dependent on the heatsink as well. Someone with a large tower vs. using the say the stock Wraith Prism is going to have more room to work with. The Wraith Prism is very capable, but it's still working with much less mass/surface area than those large towers.
 
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