The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCivilization 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.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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ComposingCoder - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
just an FYI, they tested on different settings..... Toms Hardware for example used High on civ VI vs ultra that was used here.fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Try techradar who actually patchedThey too are showing massive Intel hits
RafaelHerschel - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Correct me if I'm wrong, but TechRadar seems to have tested only two games and provides minimal information on how they tested. Plus, Intel is still a bit faster in their tests.fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Look at the geekbench scoresThey also include ‘before and after’ Spectre2 patches for Intel
The reliance of Intel on prefetch is well-known and now it’s busted
Crazyeyeskillah - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
AMD hardware crushes intel on GEEKBENCH. You have to look at all tests together, and never focus on one test, unless that is the only thing you are buying your processor for, like gaming, or video encoding.sardaukar - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
There's no need to be a dick about it.SkyBill40 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Burden of proof fallacy?ACTIVATE!
xidex2 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
So you are now Intel engineer or what? How do you know what impact those patches have on Intel CPUs? Get a grip and delete these childish comments.RafaelHerschel - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I'll add Hardware Unboxed on YouTube.ACE76 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Anandtech isn't the only one to have come to this conclusion bud.