The AMD Ryzen 3 3300X and 3100 CPU Review: A Budget Gaming Bonanza
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 7, 2020 9:00 AM EST*We are currently in the middle of revisiting our CPU gaming benchmarks, but the new suite was not ready in time for this review. We plan to add in some new games (Borderland 3, Gears Tactics) and also upgrade our gaming GPU to a RTX 2080 Ti.
Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
Ah, we have an "enlightened centrist" here. No take is too worthless, malformed or ignorant for him. Anything less than subjecting yourself to the dribblings of fools and disinformation artists is an "echo chamber". Such rational, many smart.Ian Cutress - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
You do realise that not all of the benchmarks have to confirm to your use case?There are two roads to take:
1) Out of ABCXYZ, Benchmarks XYZ are relevant to me. That's good.
2) Out of ABCXYZ, only Benchmarks XYZ are relevant to me. Why did you even bother testing ABC?
Not 100% of benchmarks have to be relevant to you. Plenty of other folks have requested these.
Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Famrnuke - Thursday, May 7, 2020 - link
I'm sorry, WHAT? Userbench? I'll assume you're joking, because that's a god-awful "benchmark". PCMark is fine, but they gave many gaming results, so actually they've done better work than a lazy PCMark result.They did 7zip/WinRAR, imaging editing, video encoding, and browser tests as well.
Exactly what would using PCMark and Userbench add?
PeterCollier - Friday, May 8, 2020 - link
PCMark writing is a good test of system responsiveness.paulemannsen - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
Userbenchmark is so bad, it now gets ridiculed permanently and has become the Number 1 Meme in the community. PCMark measures, like you said yourself, SYSTEM-responsiveness, so its understandable if its not the top priority here. Furthermore, if you arent completely braindead you can extrapolate system-behaviour from a CPU-test/benchmark. Basically everything you spew here is demontrating your total ignorance and lack of knowledge of everything. You should be utterly ashamed of yourself.PeterCollier - Saturday, May 9, 2020 - link
Mind mentioning some facts when disparaging Userbenchmark?Spunjji - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Facts! Okay:It has a known Intel bias, it doesn't actually do anything that isn't covered by the tests shown here, and even if it did *some of us would still be happier with these real-world application benchmarks*.
PeterCollier - Monday, May 11, 2020 - link
Got some links?Spunjji - Tuesday, May 12, 2020 - link
Sure, here's one that's relevant to you:http://wondermark.com/1k62/