AMD Ryzen Balanced Power Plan Benchmarked

3DMark Fire Strike and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Futuremark 3DMark Fire Strike

3DMark Fire Strike is the new showcase DirectX 11 benchmark for high-performance gaming PCs. Using a multi-threaded DirectX 11 engine, Fire Strike includes two graphics tests, a physics test and a combined test designed to stress the CPU and GPU at the same time. 3DMark Advanced and Professional Editions include an additional Extreme preset for highend systems with multiple GPUs. Fire Strike is only available in the Windows editions of 3DMark initially.

3DMark Fire Strike Physics test benchmarks the hardwares 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.

Results: The GPU and Physics score with the AMD Ryzen Balanced Power Plan look solid, but the overall score took a bit of a dive. The one score we didn’t chart (combined) fell from over 7,900 points to under 6,400 points with the new power plan, so something might be off with this benchmark and the new power plan. We aren’t sure why we are seeing a 19% performance drop in the combined benchmark test workload, but we’ve brought it up with AMD as that is lowering the overall score in this synthetic game benchmark.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an action role-playing stealth video game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. Set in a cyberpunk-themed dystopian world in 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution, Mankind Divided features the return of Adam Jensen from the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with new technology and body augmentations. The game was released on August 23rd, 2016 for PC users.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided uses a heavily modified version of the Glacier 2 engine that has been tweaked so much that they are now calling it the Dawn game engine.

We took a look at GPU performance using the DX12 API setting paired with the Medium image quality preset with MSAA and VSync turned off. We picked to run just Medium image quality settings due to how tough this game title is to render and we feel that most gamers will use this setting.

Benchmark Results: In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided when moving from the standard Windows Balanced Power Plan to the new AMD Ryzen Balanced Power Plan we got 1.6% gains at 1080P, 0.6% gains at 1440P and no gain at all when gaming at 4K.