Elsewhere, however, the race tightens up. The Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider and especially Crysis 3 love frequency of course, but they also benefit heavily from as many cores and threads as you can throw at them, with both Ryzen 5s offering a significant advantage over Intel's stock Core i5. Here, Ryzen 5 sits comfortably at a mid-point between Core i5 and Core i7. However, not everything is as it seems based on the numbers alone. Assassin's Creed Unity posts a lead on the i5, but when studying performance at the per-scene level, i5 is pulling ahead in relatively empty scenes in our benchmark, with Ryzen 5 performing better in areas packed with NPCs. There's the suggestion that the i5 frame-rate average is boosted by big performance gains in less useful, more 'empty' rendering scenes. Similarly, in the Crysis 3 benchmark, the i5 and indeed i7's scores are skewed higher when the viewpoint shifts to similarly sparse scenes.
We've got a complete breakdown of this behaviour in our video review, but the bottom line is that it's not just different game engines that can favour i5 or Ryzen 5 processors - it can actually vary on a scene-by-scene nature in many games. And of course, therefore, results can vary depending very much on what scenes are chosen for benchmarking.
To illustrate, The Witcher 3's Novigrad City - our test area - can easily max an i5 quad with 100 per cent utilisation across all cores, and Ryzen 5 is faster here. However, benchmark a less demanding area or an engine-driven cut-scene and the i5 takes the lead. We've tried to tailor our tests to concentrate more on these heavier workloads and for our money Ryzen 5 is the more versatile, capable performer in areas where the CPU matters most in gaming.
The balance of power shifts when it comes to the more expensive Core i7 7700K - despite losing two cores up against the Ryzen 5s, enabling hyper-threading sees it power ahead in most of our tests, and even though Crysis 3 in particular makes such good use of AMD's many-core design, the 7700K is the only processor in the test suite here that will keep you above 60fps at all times. It's an excellent product, but you pay a hefty premium for that top-tier consistency in performance.
