Choosing a Gaming CPU October 2013: i7-4960X, i5-4670K, Nehalem and Intel Update
by Ian Cutress on October 3, 2013 10:05 AM ESTCivilization V
A game that has plagued my testing over the past twelve months is Civilization V. Being on the older 12.3 Catalyst drivers were somewhat of a nightmare, giving no scaling, and as a result I dropped it from my test suite after only a couple of reviews. With the later drivers used for this review, the situation has improved but only slightly, as you will see below. Civilization V seems to run into a scaling bottleneck very early on, and any additional GPU allocation only causes worse performance.
Our Civilization V testing uses Ryan’s GPU benchmark test all wrapped up in a neat batch file. We test at 1440p, and report the average frame rate of a 5 minute test.
One 7970
Civ5 seems to love IPC, with our Haswell and Ivy-E CPUs all near the top. All our PCIe 3.0 combinations hit 80 FPS or above.
Two 7970s
On multiple AMD GPUs the PCIe 3.0 combiantions get the biggest boost, along with anything using a PLX or NF200 chip to boost lane allocations. There seems to be a barrier around 100-108 FPS that only Haswell and Ivy Bridge CPUs are moving over, except the one 990X result. The i7-4960X takes top spot, and the i7-920 is 45 FPS behind - almost 1/3. The i5-4430 is lower than expected, showing little scaling after the first GPU.
Three 7970s
Civ5 has terrible scaling behond one GPU let alone two, meaning most of our tri-GPU results are similar to dual GPU. Again, anything purely PCIe 3.0 seems to get the biggest boost, with the 4670K still fighting alongside the 4770K.
One 580
For a single GTX 580 the top spots above 80 FPS are all on the side of Sandy Bridge and above, with Nehalem scoring below this marker. It seems that dual core CPUs take a bashing, suggesting a quad core minimum.
Two 580s
More NVIDIA GPUs for Civ5 means more cores and more lanes where possible, with the i7-4960X taking the top spot. This is almost 40 FPS higher than the i5-4430 and the Nehalem CPUs. The 4670K doesn't miss a beat against the i7-4770K.
Civilization V Conclusion
We see some of our biggest variations in CPU performance in Civilization V, where it is clear that a modern Intel processor (Ivy/Haswell), at least quad core, is needed to get the job done for the higher frame rates. Arguably any high-end AMD processor will perform >60 FPS in our testing here as well, perhaps making the point moot. For single CPU, the i5-4430 performs well in Civ5, though in dual GPU the i5-4670K might be a better investment.
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tackle70 - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
The 8350 is with the 2600k, not the 3930k...So yeah, it's a very good showing for AMD, but not as good as what you indicate. Also, according to sweclockers, an overclocked i5 is still superior to an overclocked 83xx CPU, so make of that what you wish.
I'm just glad we're seeing games starting to use more than 2-4 threads effectively.
Traciatim - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Much more likely is that games will just become less and less reliant on CPU power because of the terrible netbook processors in the consoles and will instead rely more and more on the GPU. The PC versions of games will just be the same game with a high res texture pack and some extra graphics bling to use up GPU cycles while your processor sits around shuffling a little data.Flunk - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
I'm not sure AMD will benefit that much. As soon as consumer CPUs have a reason to have more cores they're just release a new chip with more cores. There is absolutely no reason that they can't release a 8 or ever 12 core desktop processor, they're already selling them for servers.Flunk - Friday, October 4, 2013 - link
Forgot to mention, Watch Dogs is probably x64 only because they want to use more than 2GB of RAM (which is the limit for the user-mode memory partition in Win32).Nirvanaosc - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Looking just at the gaming results, does this means that almost any CPU is capable to feed the GPU at 1440p and it is always GPU limited?Nirvanaosc - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I mean in single GPU config.Traciatim - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
That's pretty much just the games they picked. If you could reliably benchmark large scale PC games like Planetside 2, or other popular large scale MMO's reliably you'd pretty much see the exact opposite. The trouble is, it seems like no MMO makers give you reliable benchmarking tools so you can't use them for tests like these.ryccoh - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
I would really like to see a CPU comparison for strategy games.For example, one could have a save game of a far advanced game in Civilization 5 or Total War with many AI players on the largest map and then see how the waiting time varies between the different CPUs. This should be feasible, shouldn't it?
I'm running an i5 2500k @4.6ghz and it just isn't cutting it for Civilization 5 on a large map once you're far into the game, it would be nice to see whether getting hyperthreading and more cores would be worth it.
glugglug - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
Having waited the ridiculous amounts of time between turns on Civ V, and having dual monitors, I put task manager up on the second monitor while it was running, to see that Civ V *IS NOT MULTITHREADED. AT ALL*. Setting the CPU affinity to make it use only 1 logical core makes absolutely no performance difference at all! The only thing I can think of for why a better result would be seen on quad-core systems would be that it likes having a larger L3 cache.glugglug - Thursday, October 3, 2013 - link
P.S. If my "Civ V just likes cache" theory is right, an Iris Pro laptop should be the ultimate Civ V machine.