The AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X CPU Review
by Ian Cutress on February 11, 2019 11:45 AM ESTGaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Ashes: Classic | RTS | Mar 2016 |
DX12 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
1440p Standard |
4K Standard |
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Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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At the lowest resolutions, the 2500X has the high ground, but cedes it to the 8350K as the resolution ramps up.
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shticktical - Thursday, February 14, 2019 - link
Ian, why don't you include idle power consumption? And not just in this article, in all CPU reviews? System's usually spent 95% time idling. That would be very interesting to know and compare. Thank you!Ian Cutress - Friday, February 15, 2019 - link
Idle power consumption varies very wildly when you're talking about zero CPU load, and can be influenced more by the motherboard/system than the CPU itself. You can check the data in Bench regardless:https://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU-2019/2183
RSAUser - Sunday, February 17, 2019 - link
Still disappointed that Anandtech cannot use a simple bar chart plugin like canvasjs in 2019.Would love the ability to add information on hover like the current market price, or MSRP, or make it so it fetches the price from the amazon or newegg api.
This is especially relevant in these charts where you're adding intel processors that are completely out of the price league of the CPU being reviewed and you're not adding the current price to the chart.
Using a JS library to render the HTML would make those charts mobile responsive.
fadsarmy - Monday, June 10, 2019 - link
How does a 65W cpu (Ryzen 5 2600) draw 77.97W?