Alien: Isolation

If first person survival mixed with horror is your sort of thing, then Alien: Isolation, based off of the Alien franchise, should be an interesting title. Developed by The Creative Assembly and released in October 2014, Alien: Isolation has won numerous awards from Game Of The Year to several top 10s/25s and Best Horror titles, ratcheting up over a million sales by February 2015. Alien: Isolation uses a custom built engine which includes dynamic sound effects and should be fully multi-core enabled.

Alien Isolation on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Alien Isolation on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Total War: Attila

The Total War franchise moves on to Attila, another The Creative Assembly development, and is a stand-alone strategy title set in 395AD where the main story line lets the gamer take control of the leader of the Huns in order to conquer parts of the world. Graphically the game can render hundreds/thousands of units on screen at once, all with their individual actions and can put some of the big cards to task.

For low end graphics, we test at 720p with performance settings, recording the average frame rate. With mid and high range graphics, we test at 1080p with the quality setting. In both circumstances, unlimited video memory is enabled and the in-game scripted benchmark is used.

Total War: Attila on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Total War: Attila on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Grand Theft Auto V

The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise finally hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.

For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark, relying only on the final part which combines a flight scene along with an in-city drive-by followed by a tanker explosion. For low end systems we test at 720p on the lowest settings, whereas mid and high-end graphics play at 1080p with very high settings across the board. We record both the average frame rate and the percentage of frames under 60 FPS (16.6ms).

Grand Theft Auto V on ASUS GTX 980 Strix 4GB ($560)

Grand Theft Auto V on MSI R9 290X Gaming LE 4GB ($380)

Professional Performance on Linux Gaming, Cont: GRID: Autosport & Shadow of Mordor
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  • someonesomewherelse - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link

    Or fix the cpu scheduler to properly schedule threads for the highest trough put/latency/power efficiency depending on what the thread/program is doing (compressing a lot of data for archival doesn't need low latency, games/multimedia/UIs/... need low latency) the state of the machine (if you are connected to the power grid and not over heating power efficiency is not as important if you are on battery power in the middle of nowhere or if it's summer and you have no ac), user preferences (I might still be cheap and want lower total power consumption even if it means slightly less performance for things that are running in the background, or I could be using electric heating so power efficiency doesn't matter since the heat isn't waste, or maybe I want that things being run by me run better then the things that my friend is running over the network (I mean I would rather have my ui and videos smooth than his).
  • bji - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    One thing I never understand: what does "uncore" mean? It sounds like it's all the stuff that's not part of the cores. And yet, we have "Queue" and "I/O" listed separately. Why aren't those things "uncore"?
  • keeepcool - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    Wikipedia knows what it is:
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncore

    :)

    Also the Sparc is also somewhere burried in that mess.
  • bji - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    OK thanks for the pointer. So Uncore is Intel's way of referring to specific parts of the CPU that interface directly with the cores and have to be very high performance, mostly managing inter-core communication functions like cache coherency and memory access, and some high performance interconnect stuff like Thunderbolt. Not sure why they bother to have a specific name for these sections, instead of calling them out directly when they are interesting, but whatever.
  • Morawka - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    Wow price increases across the board. Even the 8core got a $100 increase almost. Lame.

    6950x was supposed to be $999, and the 8 core $600, but i see Intel doesnt have any competition so everyone has to pay.

    I'd wait for skylake E this fall/winter
  • Morawka - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    Newegg sells all xeons. Even the 20 core versions. No need to ask a system builder to order one for you
  • mooninite - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    O RLY? Find me a E3-1260L v5 on Newegg.
  • James S - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    I give you newegg doesn't sell every single CPU made but they do have the Xeon E3-1270 v5, they don't have the low power variants as you already know. One could simply snag one off Dell.com though.
  • legolasyiu - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    You should be able to overclock much better using Strix X99 gaming or Rampage V Extreme / Edition 10. I was clocking 4.3Ghz without issues with 6800K and will push 4.4Ghz soon
  • ezcameron76 - Tuesday, May 31, 2016 - link

    So I just bought the 6800k instead of the 5820k. After reading this I feel like I made the bad call and could have saved some money and get the Haswell E. Thoughts on this as I dont want to make a mistake and the new one has just shipped. I mainly play games but do some creation as well. I am redoing my pc and dont want to make a bad call if the 6800k can't overclock more then the haswell 5820k. Thoughts please everyone share.

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