The AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review: Twelve Threads vs Four at $250
by Ian Cutress on April 11, 2017 9:00 AM ESTGPU Tests: Civilization 6 (1080p, 4K)
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fifth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
MSI GTX 1080 at 1920x1080
MSI GTX 1080 at 4K
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ASUS GTX 1060 at 1920x1080
ASUS GTX 1060 at 4K
Sapphire R9 Fury at 1920x1080
Sapphire R9 Fury at 4K
Sapphire RX 480 at 1920x1080
Sapphire RX 480 at 4K
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Phiro69 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Thank you Ian!Maybe at some point as part of your benchmark description you have a url to a page showing basic (e.g. exactly the level of information you provided above but not step by step hand holding) benchmark setup instructions. I know I wonder if I've configured my builds correctly when I put together new systems; I buy the parts based on benchmarks but I don't ever really validate they perform at that level/I have things set correctly.
qupada - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I was curious about this too. Obviously a direct comparison between your Windows test and my Linux one is going to be largely meaningless but I felt the need to try anyway. Since Linux is all I have, this is what we get.My Haswell-EP Xeon E5-1660v3 - approximately an i7-5960X with ECC RAM, and that CPU seems to be oft-compared to the 1800X you have put in your results - clocks in at 78:36 to compile Chromium (59.0.3063.4), or 18.31 compiles per day (hoorah for the pile of extra money I spent on it resulting in such a small performance margin). However that's for the entire process, from unpacking the tarball, compiling, then tarring and compressing the compiled result. My machine is running Gentoo, it was 'time emerge -OB chromium' (I didn't feel like doing it manually to get just the compile). Am I reading right you've used the result of timing the 'ninja' compile step only?
I only ask because there definitely could be other factors in play for this one - for the uninitiated reading this comment, Chromium is a fairly massive piece of software, the source tar.xz file for the version I tried is 496MB (decompressing to 2757MB), containing around 28,000 directories and a shade under 210,000 files. At that scale, filesystem cache is definitely going to come into play, I would probably expect a slightly different result for a freshly rebooted machine versus one where the compile was timed immediately after unpacking the source code and it was still in RAM (obviously less of a difference on an SSD, but probably still not none).
It is an interesting test metric though, and again I haven't done this on WIndows, but there is a chunk in the middle of the process that seems to be single-threaded on a Linux compile (probably around 10% of the total wall clock time), so it is actually quite nice that it will benefit from both multi-core and single-core performance and boost clocks.
Also with a heavily multi-threaded process of that sort of duration, probably a great test of how long you get before thermal throttling starts to hurt you. I have to admit I'm cheating a bit by watercooling mine (not overclocked though) so it'll happily run 3.3GHz on a base clock of 3.0 across all eight cores for hours on end at around ~45°C/115°F.
rarson - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
14393.969 was released March 20th, any reason you didn't use that build?Ian Cutress - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
Because my OS is already locked down for the next 12-18 months of testing.Konobi - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I don't know what's up with those FPS number in rocket league 1080p. I have ye olde FX-8350 @ 4.8GHz and a GTX 1070 @ 2.1GHz and I get 244fps max and 230FPS average at 1080p Ultra.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I'm running a 4x4 bot match on Aquadome. Automated inputs to mimic gameplay and camera switching / tricks, FRAPS over 4 minutes of a match.jfmonty2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Why Aquadome specifically? It's been criticized for performance issues compared to most of the other maps in the game, although the most recent update has improved that.Ian Cutress - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
On the basis that it's the most strenuous map to test on. Lowest common denominator and all that.Adam Saint - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
"Looking at the results, it’s hard to notice the effect that 12 threads has on multithreaded CPU tests"Perhaps you mean *not* hard to notice? :)
coder543 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
I agree. That was also confusing.