Destiny 2 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. Both CPUs are clocked at 4.0GHz.  

Destiny 2

On the CPU front, Destiny 2 is not is not an overly demanding title, playing at over 60FPS at all times on most of our CPU core configurations on both AMD Ryzen and Intel Broadwell-E. 

When compared to the beta we can see that Bungie has placed a lot of effort into improving their game’s CPU performance on AMD Ryzen-based setups, giving AMD performance that is roughly equal to their Intel counterparts in most cases when both CPUs are running at the same clock speeds. 

Strangely we have found that Intel CPUs still suffer from some minor performance losses when using hyperthreading, at least when using a four core/thread configuration, though with AMD this opposite is true. Regardless, the performance difference is fairly minor in this case, especially when both offer an almost identical minimum framerate. 

The only time when we see a huge drop in game performance is when we move to a dual-core setup, with this use case being the only time where we can get the game to run at under 60FPS on our GTX 1080 at 1080p Highest settings.

Destiny 2 performs best with higher core counts, though like most games CPU clock speeds are also an important factor.