The Intel Kaby Lake-X i7 7740X and i5 7640X Review: The New Single-Threaded Champion, OC to 5GHz
by Ian Cutress on July 24, 2017 8:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Kaby Lake
- X299
- Basin Falls
- Kaby Lake-X
- i7-7740X
- i5-7640X
Civilization 6
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 fourth 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.
For all our results, we show the average frame rate at 1080p first. Mouse over the other graphs underneath to see 99th percentile frame rates and 'Time Under' graphs, as well as results for other resolutions. All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
8K
16K
ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB Performance
1080p
4K
Sapphire RX 480 8GB Performance
1080p
4K
Civilization 6 Conclusion
In all our testing scenarios, AMD wins at 1080p with minor margins on the frame rates but considerable gains in the time under analysis. Intel pushes ahead in almost all of the 4K results, except with the time under analysis at 4K using an R9 Fury, perhaps indicating that AMD is offering a steadier range in its frame rate, despite the average being lower.
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Firebat5 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
Ian,i'm interested in the details of the agility benchmark? how many photos are in your dataset and at what resolution? am doing similar work and i notice the working time doesn't seem to be linear with the number of photos.
Firebat5 - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
agisoft* autocorrect strikes again.damianrobertjones - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Capitals can be a good thing.Gothmoth - Tuesday, July 25, 2017 - link
reading this article again i must say im realyl ashamed. anandtech was once a great place but now it´s just like car magazines. who pays best gets the best reviews. where is the criticism? everyone and his grandmother things intel has big issues (tim, heat, pci lanes nonsense product) are you bend over so intel can inject more money more easily?damianrobertjones - Thursday, July 27, 2017 - link
Is your shift key broke? Where's are your capitals?zodiacfml - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Impressive benchmarks. I could not ask for more. This revealed that Intel clearly doesn't have the premium or value position anymore. It is simply not there. They have to be in the 10nm process now to be superior in value and/or performance.Walkeer - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Hi, what RAM frequency is the AMD platform running on? if its the official maximum of 2666MHz, you can get +10-15% more performance using 3200MHz or faster memorywarner001 - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Hey, This is a very useful post for the new ones. Thanks a lot. please visit http://forums.cat.com/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user...warner001 - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
nice blogedsib1 - Wednesday, July 26, 2017 - link
Please redo the Ryzen benchmarks using DDR3200 now it is officially supported, and also use the latest updates of the games - eg ROTR v770.1+ where Ryzen gets a 25% increase.You can't compare one platform with the latest updates, and the other without - thats pointless