AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTGaming Tests: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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just4U - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
There were some issues early on as the review came out (obviously got hammered..) good now tho..MDD1963 - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
The pages were indeed VERY slow to load the hour or two after they were posted....; overloaded, perhaps.NA1NSXR - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
What are you talking about, have you seen the prices? We got a big leap but we also got a value-destroying price hike. 5800X is in line with 10900K throughout the suite, but is newer and no cheaper!catavalon21 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Agree. The 10850 hands the 5800x it's backside in a great many contests, at about the same price point, yeah.just4U - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
It's just launch prices (..shrug) I'd pay the premium for the 5900x and the 5950x but the 3800? Hmm no.. I'd either opt in for the 3900x or a Intel 10core part first at that price. Needs to be priced $10 cheaper than the 10900 (non K) which brings it closer to the 8core 10700K price.just4U - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
err (should read 5800x) not 3800.yankeeDDL - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
The 10850 peaks at 140W *more* than the 5800x. It's, literally, half as efficient as the 5800x. Running the 10850 will on a daily basis will cost you easily much more than the CPU's cost itself over its lifetime.LithiumFirefly - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
Especially if you live in a climate that's warm part of the year paying more for AC cuz that Intel chip is hot AFdagobah123 - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link
This is so much more important than people realize. I think they should include a cost of ownership when discussing these prices like they do with cars.lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
it wasn't important when AMD was behind so why is it important now?