Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed so I had planned to skip over making this video even though I had done most of the testing already and the reason for that is that there really isn't anything particularly interesting or exciting to talk about in terms of performance improvements however since so many of you demanded an update I decided to look into it and at least we found one interesting thing along the way so yeah hopefully it won't be a complete waste of time anyway before we get too far into it this video is brought to you by MSI and their new and upgraded workstation laptops the MSI ws 65 in particular is one that caught my attention combining the excellent slim and light aesthetics of their gaming laptops with brand-new NVIDIA Quadro RT X 5000 graphics for professionals on the go that demand top in performance the ws 65 also packs up to Intel Core aligned processors loads of RAM a 4k display and even a fingerprint scanner for added security to learn more click the links in the description below ok so if you're sitting there wondering what all the fuss is about this Windows 10 may update well let me explain apparently Microsoft has done some work to the Windows kernel to improve CPU performance and namely for Rison and AMD even recently showed in their e3 livestream that the update is in fact optimized for Zen and it improves things such as topology awareness and it speeds up clock ramping the improved topology awareness means that Windows will focus on using calls with inner CCX before using another CCX so basically the teaming caused in the same CCX before spreading the workload to another CCX as doing so comes with a latency penalty and then the faster clock ramping means that rising can get up to speed faster with previous builds of Windows AMD said it could take around 30 milliseconds for the CPU to ramp up to higher frequencies so the update along with an upcoming chipset driver will take this to just 1 to 2 milliseconds for the chip to reach its top speed AMD's also showed a slide claiming these fixes can boost gaming performance by up to 15% while the faster clock ramping can yield a 6% and per and I think this is partly why Rison owners are so hyped about this update however as I understand these improvements aren't yet in effect and they won't be tool as into processes arrived and we get the new chipset driver despite that though there are claims all over the place from Rison owners of improved performance but as far as I can tell the gains shown have been limited to 3dmark and that's a synthetic benchmark application that we tend to avoid here at harbor unboxed it seems Rison owners are seeing improvements in 3dmark scores and then just assuming those gains will transfer over to real-world games so yeah well look at that in a moment but spoiler alert if I hadn't already given it away with the initial introduction to this video the reason I was gonna skip it was because all my results were within the margin of error and I wasn't even confident if any of these optimizations that aim they're talking about are actually active yet and after speaking with the all-knowing Wendel of level one techs if you haven't subscribed to level one text then I suggest you do it I'll stick a link in the video description but after speaking to Wendell my suspicions were confirmed at this point it sounds like the Zen scheduler still isn't enabled in the 1903 build and again for this you will need the AMD chipset driver the improved clock ramping is also going to be enabled by the upcoming chipset driver and possibly even a firmware update will be needed there not a hom percent sure on that one Wendell also told me that he's heard these n3 architecture will have a hardware fix to address this issue taking the current changes in clock frequency from the current 30-plus milliseconds down to just one to two milliseconds anyway as I said earlier I wasn't going to make this video because there really isn't our thing to report at least in terms of performance but due to the large volume of requests for an updated 1903 benchmark I've decided to go ahead with the video actually it wasn't just the sheer volume of requests but rather all the misinformation I was seeing quite a few of you are telling me you've been told of big performance improvements with the new update on Rison and since that isn't really the case at least not yet anyway I thought a video is probably necessary after all so I took the rise in 720 700 X and Rison 520 600 X tested them on Windows using the 1809 Bill then I updated and tested with the 1903 build and of course we ran all the tests again for the graphics card I'm using the gigabyte r-tx 20 atti or as extreme and for the memory a 16 gigabyte kit of G skills Flair exterior for 3200 cell 14 so let's take a look at the results starting with Cinebench our 20 we see similar scores for both processors using either version of Windows 1809 or 1903 honestly I wasn't really expecting any changes to have any impact on this particular workload but I know you guys will want some Cinebench scores anyway here we can also see that the single core performance was also the same so again no surprises here moving to WinRAR and we do see a two percent performance improvement for the 2700 X and this is of course based on a three run average it's hard to say if the new Windows build is responsible for such a small gain typically I'd consider 2% to be within the margin of error and we can see that perhaps that is the case here given the 2600 X is less than a 1% improvement the last application I bothered to look at was premiere again nothing to report here at less than a 1% difference for both CPUs all up I benchmarked 10 games with obviously both versions of Windows and there were no noteworthy margins to speak of so I'm not going to talk about each game because as I said there's really nothing to talk about I'll just cycle through the graphs you've probably seen a few of them by now so we'll just do that and then I'll wrap this up at most we saw a 2% difference in performance and on occasion the older 18:09 build was faster but again we're talking about the margin of error here results that are within the margin of error so yeah honestly there's no noticeable performance difference in any of the games tested I had also seen some people claiming that the 19:03 build improves performance of the first gen processors so the original Zen processors and I think that's because the slides that AMD showed said Zen optimizations and not Zen plus or Zen 2 but they just mean Zen in general the Zen architecture which encompasses all versions of Zen so yeah these updates aren't targeting or are providing bigger improvements for those with first-generation Pro but since I had the results for the risin five 1600 I thought I would take a look at the risin five 1600 on the 1903 build and again absolutely no difference in performance I'm not going to show you guys those graphs because they're just more graphs that don't tell you anything particularly useful but I can assure you that the first gen and second gen Rison processors all look the same I will just say though it's possible these windows optimizations are currently offering noticeable gains for the higher core count for every percy per use can't comment on that yet because I haven't tested them I believe Wendell will be doing some testing with the 29 9 WX soon yeah for now not sure on that one of precious focused on the a.m. for CPUs I also tested ARMA 3 at the request of a few patreon members the hope he was that the update would help our performance in older titles where rise and struggles a bit but yes sadly that wasn't the case at least not yet anyway now remember that slide from AMD that I showed earlier in the video that showed the risin 7 3800 X to be 15% faster with the May 2019 update when playing rocket League well I decided to go back and do the testing all over again so install an 1809 build then update it and do that for both the 2600 X and 2700 X and well that allowed me to test rocket League which I hadn't done previously so I did this at 1080p using the high quality settings again with an RT X xx atti and I also removed the 250 FPS frame cap sadly though no 15% gain for the 2,700 X or the 2600 X again will probably need the new chipset driver for those kinds of gains and then finally moving on to one last thing what are all these guys so excited about over on the AMD reddit page improved 3dmark scores apparently firstly I had to Google what 3d mark was then download a program on Steam that simulates a game but isn't a game we'd shit I know and once I run this mysterious program a few numbers were spat out in my favorite web browser okay so I'll cut the crap I know what 3d mark is but I said we just don't use it on the channel anyway drew my surprise yeah 3d mark scores were boosted significantly with the 1903 update and here I was thinking all the bots on reddit spent too much time looking at porn on their pcs and they were infested with malware apologies to the r / MD community some of our patreon members also saw the same thing big gains for the total and physics scores and 3dmark but zero improvement for every other game and application they tested at least nothing that was out of the margin of error so if you're asking yourself well what gives here I don't have any real answer for you I guess either 3dmark was broken on Rison previously or more likely there's a bug with 3d mark when using the new version of Windows either way doesn't really matter too much as the performance uplift seen here when running 3d mark has no bearing on real-world gameplay so yeah that is a bit of a shame overall it seems there's really nothing to see here so yeah sorry if you feel I've wasted your time on this one just showing you graphs with margin of error differences like I said I was going to completely skip this video as the testing was uninteresting I'd done it anyway but yeah what didn't really make for an exciting video but yeah with so many people now hitting me up on Twitter and comment section on YouTube and pretty much everywhere over the last few days freaking out about these alleged improvements I thought it probably made sense to make the video anyway hopefully we will see some improvements in the not-too-distant future once we get the new chipset driver and I hope is that clear on how that will be rolled out there are suggestions that's being rolled out by the windows update some people may have it already but I haven't seen anyone showing any gains in well any applications or games outside of 3d mark and then a few people have shown cinema j-15 scores to have changed but again they're really within the margin of error so yeah if there are any changes or anything different to what we found here then I'll certainly update this information in a future video but as far as we can tell at this point you shouldn't be seeing any major performance improvements with the 1903 update with horizon processor so for now it just seems to be a bit of a hype train so these Windows updates are often followed by i heiped rains back in late 2017 we did derail the full creator update that was said to improve performance by an insane 20% in reality it was more like a 0% somewhere around there was only a couple of percent at best so consider this hype train derailed once again also please note that these windows and Driver optimizations aren't meant to improve things that much it'll certainly help a bit but you won't see the massive performance gains that are being reported by well programs such as 3d mark for example it's not uncommon that when these new windows updates are rolled out that people see performance improvements and for the most part people who are seeing these performance improvements are seeing them because there was actually something wrong with their previous install of Windows and the update corrects that so those with a clean operating system like what we've tested with here today they should see little to no performance change so again if you are seeing some sort of big change or a particular gamers showing improvements don't necessarily assume it that's the 1903 update it could just be that there was something wrong previously of course this time creating a bit of extra excitement and confusion was 3dmark but I've explained what I think's going on there and again those results don't transfer over to any other real-world applications or games so yeah just a synthetic benchmark doing synthetic benchmark things but hopefully we can put that one to rest now still it will be interesting to see what improvements this upcoming AMD chipset driver might deliver but yeah I wouldn't be expecting any miracles we're not expecting to see any huge changes here just a nice little performance bump where perhaps horizon needed at most but again we'll just have to wait and see what really happens when we get that drive up and that is going to do it for this one if you did enjoy the video be sure to the like button subscribe for more content and if you appreciate what we do or how I box then consider supporting us on patreon this video ended up being quite a bit of work quite a lot of installing windows updating windows reinstalling Windows updating windows doing all that kind of stuff I didn't just roll back to go back and forth on the testing because that can cause other problems so yeah a lot of hours were wasted installing and updating windows and then not to mention all the applications required for testing so if you appreciate that you can jump over to our patreon account and that also gives you access to our discord chat we can chat to you guys while we're doing this kind of testing see what you're seeing and sort of work with you on that one and actually our patreon members were very helpful in this one because they were also seeing the big 3d mark performance uplifted as ice as I said but they weren't seeing gains anywhere else so I suppose also thank you to our patreon members who helps me on this one as always we very much appreciate you guys anyway thank you to everyone who watched this video I'm your host Steve and I'll see you again next time