Destiny 2 Beta PC Performance Review

CPU Performance – Ryzen & Intel – How many cores does Destiny 2 require?

Methodology

Full on CPU performance testing is something that is relatively new in our PC game performance analysis pieces, with Ryzen performance being a new addition to our hardware test suite.  

Here we have tested the game using an Intel i7 6850K Broadwell-E Hex-core and an AMD Ryzen 7 1700X over a variety of core configurations when playing the game at 1080p max settings on a GTX 1080. Both CPUs are run at similar clock speeds. 

We ran our Ryzen 7 1700X with 8/16, 6/12, 4/8 and 4/4 core/thread configurations to closely match results from Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 processors. Note that in all of these tests that 16MB of L3 cache was active and that these are not exact emulations of each Ryzen series CPU at the same clock speeds. Even so, these results represent a reasonable ballpark figure.  

On the Intel side, we tested 6/12, 4/8, 4/4 and 2/4 core configurations to represent Intel’s current generation i3, i5 and i7 CPU core configurations.  

Destiny 2

When playing Destiny 2 we found that the game is not very demanding on the CPU front, with the Beta playing at over 60FPS regardless of the CPU core configuration that we used.

We did see a big drop in game performance when moving from our Intel quad core setup to our dual-core, quad-thread configuration, though even in this config the game played at over 60FPS. Even so, we would recommend that PC players own a strong quad-core CPU to play Destiny 2, as CPU loads could be higher in the final game with increased enemy counts. 

Moving to higher core counts we can see that Destiny 2’s performance generally improves, though we have found that Destiny 2 does not make good use of SMT in quad-core or higher configurations. In our 4-core 8-thread configurations we actually see a small decrease in performance when compared to a 4-core 4-thread configuration on both our AMD and Intel CPUs.   

When comparing AMD’s Ryzen and Intel’s Broadwell-E CPUs, we can see that Intel has an advantage here, though framerate differences are minor, with both brands offering fairly similar minimum framerates. It is doubtful that many PC gamers would be able to tell the difference between both systems during gameplay, as both systems are capable of running the game with minimum framerates that are around 100FPS.   

This is another place where optimisations closer to launch could improve the game’s performance, though to be honest the game already performs well in this regard, only seeing CPU performance limitations when players use lower core counts.     

 

  

  (Destiny 2’s Beta does not use SMT)