AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile processors are all set to wreak havoc on Intel’s fortunes in the notebook space. By bringing octa-core designs to 15W devices, even the newer 10nm based Ice Lake chips don’t have much of a chance against the Renoir parts. (sballergy.com) The only advantage Team Blue has is with respect to single-threaded workloads, and gaming, where the IPC and clocks tend to matter more than raw processing power. Unfortunately, GPU bottlenecks mean that this will be nullified in most cases and the two rivals should offer roughly similar performance. Unexpectedly though, the Ryzen 7 4800H is twice as fast compared to the Core i7-9750H in GTA V (paired with an RTX 2060):
These benchmarks were conducted by TomsHardware (link at the end), but the outlet failed to provide any explanation for this unexpected result. My hypothesis is that this has something to do with Rockstar’s RAGE engine. In both RDR2 as well as GTA V, the performance drops significantly with hex-core CPUs, and the delta between 8-core and 6-core parts is too wide to be normal.
Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-H vs AMD Ryzen 4000 Cinebench R15 and R20 Benchmarks
Battlefield V Runs at a Silky Smooth 60 FPS Using the 20W Ryzen 7 4700U iGPU at 1080p
Regardless of the cause, this is a solid win for AMD. Performing nearly twice as fast than to the nearest Intel competitor in a popular game like GTA V won’t sit well with Intel fans. Another noteworthy point is how the Dell G7 and the Acer Triton 500 yield the exact same frame rates despite featuring CPUs a generation apart (9750H vs 8750H). I’m not sure if Rockstar’s lousy optimization is to blame here (or Intel’s 14nm fantasies), it’s pretty disappointing really.
