The AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review: Twelve Threads vs Four at $250
by Ian Cutress on April 11, 2017 9:00 AM ESTGPU Tests: Civilization 6 (1080p, 4K)
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fifth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
MSI GTX 1080 at 1920x1080
MSI GTX 1080 at 4K
>
ASUS GTX 1060 at 1920x1080
ASUS GTX 1060 at 4K
Sapphire R9 Fury at 1920x1080
Sapphire R9 Fury at 4K
Sapphire RX 480 at 1920x1080
Sapphire RX 480 at 4K
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
254 Comments
View All Comments
Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Benchmarks: I love the new Chromium compilation and straightforward 4K h264->h265 tests. Bravo.Lehti - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
As it is, the Ryzen 5 lineup is a compelling purchase, even for us European who usually get awful deals with PC components. If AMD released it as an APU lineup, however, this would be a no-brainer for everyone. And yes, I know that Ryzen 5 chips are basically binned Ryzen 7s, but still...vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Can't agree there, I'm from Europe and the 7600k is only around $20 more expensive than the Ryzen 1500x and it beats it in a lot of games and also fares better in office workloads. And that $20 gets at least even out when you put in consideration the Intel B250 motherboards which are $20-40 than competing AMD B350 mainstream offers.Meteor2 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Where in Europe are you? In the UK the R5 1500X is $80 cheaper than the the i5-7600K.t.s - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
You're focusing in single threaded apps / games, again, and again, and again. Not everyone use they computer for ST apps / games. And when you factored it in, R5 is very compelling product.vladx - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
That's true but enthusiasts and prosumers are maybe 2% of the market, the rest 98% won't use their PC for more than browsing the web, watching movies and basic office work.deltaFx2 - Friday, April 14, 2017 - link
@vladx : That's true but if browsing the web, watching movies, and basic office work is all you do, Excavator is perfectly fine for you. I expect people buying 7700k or R5 or even some i5s have some workloads that justify the expense. This is especially true of Ryzen as the current crop need an external GPU. IIRC Raven Ridge desktop parts come only next year.Sages - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Would it be possible to do another power review with ryzen like you guys did with Carrizo in 2016? Or do you guys not have the equipment for that? For me as a electrical engineering student that article was very interesting. Keep up the good work!!TheJian - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
"A side note on OS preparation. As we're using Windows 10, there's a large opportunity for something to come in and disrupt our testing. So our default strategy is multiple: disable the ability to update as much as possible, disable Windows Defender, uninstall OneDrive, disable Cortana as much as possible, implement the high performance mode in the power options, and disable the internal platform clock which can drift away from being accurate if the base frequency drifts (and thus the timing ends up inaccurate)."Or you could have just used Win7 since 1/2 the world still uses it and don't plan on quitting it until well after 2020. Until I see someone actually REVIEW these chips with win7, they won't get my money. Vulkan runs on everything, I have no need for dx12 (all everything you guys just mentioned plus all the tracking etc etc). With no apu crap involved here, you should test win7 if only to show if there is any differences. Considering most of the issues are bios fixes it seems (motherboard), no reason to abandon win7 in testing. Again, half of your readers are using it, more than 2x win10, and many of these people are stuck on it because they don't know how to get back to win7...ROFL
I can't wait for everyone to drop dx12 once whatever they're working on currently is done (many too far along to quit right now in a current game build). I think we'll see many more Vulkan/dx11 only announcements later this year. No point in a dev supporting an OS (dx12 I mean) that was given away for a year and still can't hit 1/2 of win7's users, not to mention many woke up an were accidentally "upgraded" to win10 with no ability to get back reliably. Uninstalling it doesn't always work (and many don't own win7 discs to get back in cases like Dell etc for some people) ;)
But hey, keep acting like win7 doesn't exist much to the chagrin of your readers.
vladx - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
"Until I see someone actually REVIEW these chips with win7, they won't get my money."Who are you punishing here, but yourself? You probably shouldn't anyway because neither Ryzen or Kabylake are supported on Win7.