The Core i9 Gaming Benchmarks Intel Commissioned Against AMD Are a Flat Lie

. With AMD having gotten off the beaten track, Chipzilla has gotten more and more facts about it. end up, no matter what. But Intel is using this site to claim that it's up to 50 percent faster than AMD in gaming based on Ashes of Singularity in particular – and that's where the problems really start. The results are, at times, a little high, but the expectations are not huge. The AMD results, on the other hand, are crippled.

There are several problems with the AMD benchmarks as run by Principle Technologies. What is it that we know what, exactly, the company did wrong.

First, the Ryzen systems have been tested without XMP enabled. XMP is the high-end memory timing standard that enthusiast kits use to hit maximum performance and Ryzen gaming performance is often tied directly to its RAM clock and sub-timings. Using substandard timing could lower Ryzen's performance by 5-15 percent.

Second, all of the benchmarks in question were run using a GTX 1080 Ti and a resolution of just 1080p. If you wanted to create a report to Ryzen's weaknesses, that's the resolution you'd use. Unfair? Not necessarily – it's the most common after all. But there's a reason we include 1440p and 4K results in our comparisons for gaming, and Intel / Pinnacle did not do so.

Third, Principle Technologies notes that it enabled "Game Mode" in AMD's Ryzen Master utility. The implication is that it was this on both systems. This can have serious side effects on AMD system benchmarks. On Threadripper, Engaging Game Mode cuts the CPU core count in half and allows you to get the most out of the memory. On Ryzen 7, clicking Game Mode just cuts the core count in half. That's why AMD's user guide for Ryzen 7 specifically states that Game Mode is reserved principally for Threadripper and that Ryzen customers should not use it:

in the CPU focused benchmark (the same one PT used). We use Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, which has some enhancements for Ryzen, and they are using Ashes of the Singularity, but there is still a huge gap between the two sets of data.

Their Core i7-8700K is actually a slower than bear, but our Ryzen 7 2700X is a massive 1.36x faster. TechSpot actually checked the exact results with AotS benchmarks of their own. In the graphs below, red bars indicate Pinnacle Technology results.

Their Assassin Creed Origin tests are similarly broken:

Because they are effectively benchmarking the Ryzen 7 2700X as a quad-core CPU with lousy memory timings, it's no particular surprise that the Ryzen 7 ends up getting its ass kicked. This goes beyond simply adjusting a few things to your hardware and subtly disadvantages the competition. The Ryzen 7 2700X has been configured with sub-optimal timings while the system is configured with an ideal memory subsystem and all of its cores and threads enabled.

Misrepresenting product performance by 3-5 percent is a tilt. Misrepresenting it by 1.2x (Aot) and almost 1.25x (as in ACO) is a lie. And that means these results are related. They may be related to ignorance or error rather than the result of a deliberate malicious intervention, but given Intel's history. Even if a casual readthrough of the document should be taken into account – if, in fact, they were mistakes. And if in the most charitable reading, they should not be in the same business as Ryzen Master if they were not going to read the documentation. Anybody can have a test go go poorly or mistype a number, but TechSpot found evidence of manipulation in every single benchmark they checked. Either the 8700K was strangely faster than the 2700X was significantly slower, or both.

What makes the whole affair more likely that we expect Intel to win this comparison anyway. There was no need to resort to crippling the 2700X to pull ahead. The company could've done that by using 1080p and choosing tests where Ryzen does not compete as well. The sharp-eyed would call foul, but people are using it as a starting point. Instead, Pinnacle Technologies has asked about its own expertise and raised serious questions about what, exactly, Intel was attempting to accomplish with this whitepaper.

Now Read: AMD Announces New 12-Core and 24-Core Threadripper CPUs, Performance-Boosting Memory Mode, AMD May Regain 30 Percent Desktop Market Share By Q4 2018, and If Intel Is Suffering a CPU Shortage, Can AMD Pick Up the Slack?