Destiny 2
Destiny 2 performance was intended for our CPU evaluation we did initially, but, couldn’t complete due to the issues Ryzen 3000 series CPU’s have with this game. AMD released a beta chipset driver which contains a workaround for the Destiny 2 RdRAND issue, but it isn’t the proper fix in that the real one needs to be done in the AGESA code. I thought I would look at the performance data given that I already collected a lot of it prior to discovering the issues with Ryzen 3000 and Destiny 2.
I’m going to start off by saying the fix actually sucks in my experience. The game is unstable on the platform at best. I experienced many quirks while trying to test it. Destiny has a feature which is unique as far as I know. When you are in a loading screen you can hit F1 and adjust your gear, disintegrate things you don’t want and so on. It gives you something to do while dealing with potentially long loading screens.
However, using this feature would cause the game to stop responding to the point of having to sign out of Windows and force the application to close. Attempting to close it through task manager didn’t work. You also can’t alt-tab out of the game without it crashing in a similar fashion. I also experienced two random application hangs just playing the game normally.
Because of the issues with this game and the fact that it’s one I actually play almost daily, I did more testing than I might ordinarily do, and some useful information was obtained in the process. Destiny is a bit odd on Ryzen processors in general. As you can see, Threadripper actually outperforms the Ryzen 7 2700X and it really shouldn’t due to the CCX complexes.
First off, we can see the average frame rates displayed at 1080P low. There is a gap between the 3900X and the 9900K, which is noticeable to the tune of about 10% at stock settings. However, when overclocked, the 9900K picks up almost a 20% lead over the Ryzen 9 3900X.
Many of you are going to point out that This is largely academic, as this is a CPU bound resolution and increasing settings or going to a higher resolution would place more of our load on the GPU. And I’d have largely agreed with you on that front, but I’ve got a ton of hours in Destiny 2 on my Threadripper system and it does not provide the same smooth experience I have seen on the Intel systems. At 4K using the Ultra preset, we see the Ryzen 9 3900X appears faster than our Intel test system. The Ryzen 7 2700X isn’t all that far behind. Even the mighty Threadripper keeps up in this game very easily. As I said, I’ve got a lot of hours in this game and this doesn’t track with my experiences.
Using NVIDIA’s Frameview, I captured additional data. I didn’t have time to do this on all the test systems we used in our CPU review and in this review. I cut to it and did the tests on the 9900K and the Ryzen 9 3900X. After all, I think these are the two systems that really matter in this comparison. However, I did pull the Threadripper data as well but didn’t graph it out. I’ll talk about that in a minute.
What we can see here is that our MSI X570 GODLIKE based system shows very low minimums compared to our Intel system which barely drops below 60FPS. Now, this isn’t something you actually feel as it doesn’t do this very often, but the drop is still always present. I have seen the same thing on the Threadripper system. I always saw the FPS counter drop to around 45FPS, but when I used Frameview on that system, I saw it drop to 26FPS on a manual overclock and about 35FPS on PBO. Those results align with what we see on our 3900X system.
Also, you can see the enormous maximum FPS jump on the Ryzen 9 3900X as well. It has a huge maximum frame rate lead over the Intel system. What’s even stranger is that the Ryzen 9 3900X is slower than the Threadripper system outside of the average frame rate. The maximum for my TR 2920X is even higher. It came in at around 189FPS I think. I lost that data, so I’m going off memory for whatever that’s worth. That’s why it’s not graphed out here. Essentially though, it leads me to conclude that while you can start the game, Destiny 2 is definitely NOT fixed on the Ryzen 3000 series. In fact, that should be a given since the 2920X is faster than the Ryzen 9 3900X is and it shouldn’t be.
This is a case where you really have to look at the whole picture and Intel delivers a better experience here. The point of this testing really started with my own idle curiosity and exploded into a deeper dive. I thought I’d share the information with our readers so that if they buy a Ryzen 3000 series and play this game on it, they’ll understand the performance they’ll probably see in the game. This is also something worth mentioning as its partial resolution to an issue we encountered reviewing both the motherboard and this processor.