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
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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
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lefty2 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Yeah, also with the RX 480 the i5 7400 scores better then i5 7600 (by a huge margin)! That makes no sensesharrken - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
AdoredTV did a very interesting video about exactly this issue, called "Ryzen of the Tomb Raider". In pretty extensive testing they show that something is definitely wrong with Nvidia cards in DX12 on Tomb Raider.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tfTZjugDeg
On a Ryzen 1800X system, crossfire RX 480's beat out an overclocked Titan X, 90fps on the 480's and only 80fps on a Titan X - which is just ridiculously wrong when you look at the relative GPU power.
Some other people have run more tests, and a similar thing is happening in The Division, so it seems highly likely that Nvidia has some strange issues somewhere along the line with DX12.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/62n813/inspi...
milli - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
It's also happening in Battlefield 1, Deus Ex: MD & Total War: W.https://www.computerbase.de/2017-03/amd-ryzen-1800...
Are nVidia drivers not detecting Ryzen CPU's correctly or is it foul play?
mdw9604 - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
Poor AVX implementation /w AMD and the driver.milli - Thursday, April 13, 2017 - link
What has AVX to do with nVidia's DX12 drivers???bug77 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Really great job not throwing intel power consumption in there for comparison. /sIan Cutress - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Mainly because that part of the discussion was purely to do with CCX arrangement and core loading.But sure, because you asked so nicely. /s They've been added.
bug77 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Thanks.Phiro69 - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Could you comment on your Chromium Compile benchmark a bit; I'd like to use it as part of a pitch on why our compile farm needs replacing (e.g. "look what a $249 cpu can do").What OS did you build under, I'm guessing Windows 10 from your earlier statements in the full article?
Did you follow these directions for the most part? https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/m...
If so (and you used Windows 10), then you used Visual Studio? Which version and which license of VS?
Thanks! Great review!
Ian Cutress - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Win 10 x64 Pro v1607, Build 14393.953. VS Community 2015.3 with Win10 SDK. I bascially followed the instructions in that link. :)