When I set out to build pr0metheus I was not trying to set any records. In fact I was planning on reusing a lot of the parts from Tantalus when building it. The only things to change were to be the CPU, motherboard and the graphics card. This eventually morphed into a three thousand Canadian dollar mega machine that could smash binary numbers all over the place.
pr0metheus became a monster and as such during testing grabbed it’s predecessor, Tantalus, by the throat and threw it across the room and out the window.
Tantalus was my previous flagship based on a Ryzen 7 1700 running at an all-core overclock of 3.6GHz. Paired to it I originally had two AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB reference cards in a CrossfireX configuration. When AMD announced the decision to yet again move away from CrossfireX/dual GPU I decided to move on to a single good card. That ended up being a GTX 1070 Ti flavoured by MSI. I won the silicon lottery with that card and it traded punches with Dan’s GTX 1080 all day when overclocked.
But we are here to talk about pr0metheus and how it compares. pr0metheus is powered by a Ryzen 7 5800X running at an all-core overclock at 4.6GHz. My plans to use a new graphics card were nearly dashed by the COVID19 induced chip shortage but I was lucky enough to snag a Radeon 6800XT Midnight edition directly from AMD for MSRP. This is a much more powerful GPU that I really need since I primarily play at 2560×1080 but it was available and I was lucky enough to pick it up.
Alright lets look at the benchmarks. First we have Fire Strike Extreme.
As you can see pr0metheus handily stomps all over Tantalus here eventually yielding a 149% improvement in overall score.
Next we have Time Spy.
We have another absolute stomping again of Tantalus. I do admit these really aren’t apples to apples comparisons when it comes to GPUs but we do have an interesting physics result here. Here we only see a 49% increase in score so obviously DirectX is doing something a little different in this case. Overall score here though still issues a flogging at a 129% improvement on pr0metheus over Tantalus.
In our last 3DMark based test we have the Port Royal ray-tracing test. Nvidia did unlock ray-tracing for the GTX 1070 ti in a move to encourage people to buy their 20 series ray-tracing cards.
As you can see the GTX 1070 ti’s prowess with ray-tracing was not impressive. Even though a 1665 number sounds impressive initially that only rounds to about a 5 to 6 frames per second performance with dips down to 2 at times. pr0metheus with the Radeon RX 6800XT handily pushes a score of 9121 which comes out at around 35 to 45 frames per second. This is a 448% increase in ray-tracing performance. This is cool to see as AMD still isn’t using exclusive cores for it’s ray-tracing rendering like Nvidia does on its 20 and 30 series cards. I am excited to see what AMD’s solution to Nvidia’s DLSS will be capable of even if ray-tracing is not a must have for myself personally.
Now we have a couple benchmarks from Unigine. Here I have Average FPS and Scores for Valley and Superposition benchmarks.
Continuing the trend here we have an obvious improvement when moving to pr0metheus from Tantalus. 120% improvement in fact.
Same trend here showing the same percent improvement as average FPS. Blue is Tantalus and red is pr0metheus.
In Superposition we have a much tougher DX12 benchmark but still a drastic 110% improvement in frames per second here over Tantalus.
Superposition score shows much of the same. Here we see the same 110% improvement as with the average frames per second.
Moving on to some other benchmarks we’ll start with Final Fantasy XV by Square-Enix.
Running this benchmark at it’s maximum setting of 1080p High we get another massive difference though Tantalus’ performance here is not bad here by any means. pr0metheus still does show a 95% performance improvement.
Next we have Grand Theft Auto V. I put all the settings to their available maximum at 1080p. I know that 1080p really isn’t where this 6800XT is really meant for but at the moment that’s where I game so these are the relevant numbers for me.
GTA V does still run great on an older CPU like the Ryzen 1700 with at GTX 1070 Ti but clearly pr0metheus wins this with is 5800X and 6800XT combo. By an actual 158%.
Now we have two more Square-Enix offerings including Rise of the Tomb Raider and Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
Same story pretty much compared to previous benchmarks here. pr0metheus is stomping all over Tantalus with a 95% performance improvement though Tantalus still offers up decent performance at 1080p.
Now this is an anomaly and I don’t understand the performance numbers here. Here pr0metheus wins only by a margin of error. It only managed 1FPS better than Tantalus. Needless to say I was shocked. Re-running the test on pr0metheus returned results all around the same number within a margin of error of Tantalus.
Finally we have the industry standard for testing CPU performance. Cinebench R23 tested both systems at their overclocked speeds. Tantalus was overclocked to 3.6GHz and pr0metheus was overclocked to 4.6GHz. Both are eight core and 16 thread CPUs so we do have a decent comparison here between generations.
I included multi-core and single core in this chart. You see here that the 5800X in pr0metheus pulls away quite well in multi-core performance and get a pretty decent bump in single core with a 75% and 62% performance improvement respectively.
So overall we see quite an improvement with pr0metheus over Tantalus minus the oddball result form Deus Ex Mankind Divided. It’t not really a big surprise when it comes down to it and really comparing the two systems in this way really isn’t fair. I would love to compare the CPUs and GPUs directly with the Ryzen 7 1700 and the 6800XT and GTX 1070 Ti and the same with the Ryzen 7 5800X but I honestly don’t have the time.
That said I am very happy with the performance of pr0metheus and look forward to wasting it impressiveness playing games like World of Warships and Outriders to name a couple.
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