The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion
by Ian Cutress on January 3, 2017 12:02 PM ESTShadow of Mordor
The final title in our testing is another battle of system performance with the open world action-adventure title, Shadow of Mordor. Produced by Monolith using the LithTech Jupiter EX engine and numerous detail add-ons, SoM goes for detail and complexity to a large extent, despite having to be cut down from the original plans. The main story itself was written by the same writer as Red Dead Redemption, and it received Zero Punctuation’s Game of The Year in 2014.
For testing purposes, SoM gives a dynamic screen resolution setting, allowing us to render at high resolutions that are then scaled down to the monitor. As a result, we get several tests using the in-game benchmark. For low-end graphics we examine at 720p with low settings, whereas mid and high-end graphics get 1080p Ultra. The top graphics test is also redone at 3840x2160, also with Ultra settings, and we also test two cards at 4K where possible.
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1PYTHON1 - Saturday, January 21, 2017 - link
u do realize the 6700k only clocks to 4.5 or 4.6 if u get a good one...this will do 5ghz. so saying theres 0 improvement is crap.Gasaraki88 - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
Why are you testing with Win7 when the CPUs have more functionality under Windows 10?ltcommanderdata - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link
I thought Intel wasn't going to release Windows 7/8.1 drivers for 200-series chipsets and Kaby Lake in accordance with Microsoft's policy that Skylake was the last new CPU family to be officially supported by those OS. If Anandtech tested Z270 motherboards and Kaby Lake with Windows 7 did Intel end up releasing Windows 7 drivers for 200-series chipsets after-all or do existing 100-series drivers work with the 200-series or is some other workaround being done?jimbo2779 - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link
I dont think it was intel saying they wouldn't release drivers for win 7, that would be them shooting themselves in the foot big time. Microsoft were saying they would not be supporting new features in CPUs.I believe this means things like a new sse instruction set would not have native support in windows prior to 8. However this does not stop a CPU manufacturer from implementing support via drivers which is what intel would likely do at some point if not at launch.
Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, January 4, 2017 - link
Probably because they don't want to re-test the old systems under Windows 10 just for this review. But yeah, I do think it's about time AnandTech move on to Windows 10 as the baseline OS.Iketh - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
Identical IPC yet AVX Offset support? Can clarify plz?Iketh - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
nevermind, you clarified in overclocking sectionIketh - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
for anyone else wondering, AVX Offset is not an additional instruction set, it's a bios settingUser.Name - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
It's really time for a new suite of gaming tests if they aren't showing any difference between the CPUs.For one thing, average framerates are meaningless when doing CPU tests. You need to be looking at minimum framerates.
Just look at the difference between CPUs in Techspot's Gears of War 4 performance review: http://www.techspot.com/review/1263-gears-of-war-4...
Or GameGPU's Watch Dogs 2 CPU test: http://gamegpu.com/images/stories/Test_GPU/Action/...
So many people keep repeating that CPUs don't matter for gaming these days, but that's absolutely wrong. The problem is that many of the hardware review sites that have been around for a long time seem to have forgotten how to properly benchmark games.
takeshi7 - Tuesday, January 3, 2017 - link
I agree that AnandTech should improve their gaming benchmarks. Some frame time variance measurements would be nice, and also some runs with lower graphics settings so that the CPU is the bottleneck rather than the GPU.