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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happy medium - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
this review could not have purposely made the Ryzen cpu's look any better.This site is ruined.
Drumsticks - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Care to elaborate?mmegibb - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
This review is consistent with what I saw with the Ryzen 7 reviews on multiple sites. In multi-threaded tests, Ryzen beats Intel because, well, it has more threads. Single thread performance lags Intel. It's up to the user to figure out price/performance for their particular needs.I'm with Drumsticks, please elaborate. This kind of drive-by comment does nothing to advance the conversation.
Anandtech's suite of benchmarks is one of the best.
fanofanand - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Not only is Anandtech's benchmark suite the best, Ian is the best CPU reviewer in the business, and quite probably in the world. I would love to know what reviewer out there has a better understanding of uArches and has the experience of a professional overclocker who pushed every component to the limits. Ian's experience and background is ideal to review CPUs, and after having read the entire thing I didn't detect even a whiff of bias. Claims of bias towards AMD at Anandtech, that's a new one to me!ddriver - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
Well, the JS benchmarks are pointless really.There is much to be demanded from the benches.
Too much emphasis put on games, do really 50% of the people use computers primarily for games?
Too little on practical tests, number crunching tests are with software barely anyone uses.
People need to see performance in premiere, after effects, cubase, pro tools, vray and similar.
Bias towards AMD however is hilarious, it is quite the opposite actually.
th3ron - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
You seem to forget this is a review of $250 budget cpu's. No one's going to be running pro apps like the ones you listed on cpu's like these. The number crunching test are there for comparison with the more expensive cpu's. I don't think anyones ever bought a cpu based on its Winrar score.A lot of people will uses these cpu's for gaming so lots of gaming benchmarks make sense.
ddriver - Tuesday, April 11, 2017 - link
People who use winrar most likely do not make logical considerations, because if they did, they wouldn't be using garbage like winrar.It is not a budget product, it is mid-range. And it is perfectly capable of doing a good job in content creation and such at a great value. Most of the software used in this review can barely make use of 4 threads, making such tests 66.66% pointless. Most of the tests that can actually scale to utilize the chip are software barely anyone uses or isn't even practically useful to begin with. And contrary to your beliefs, that doesn't accurately translate into performance in software that people actually use.
wolfemane - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Get off your high horse. People with midrange CPUs aren't going to use pro software? Are you really serious? I know far more people on i5s and Older AMD CPU's who use premier and after effects. My wife and I use the Adobe suite regularly. Both our systems are running 2500k's. She is photographer and has been using mid-range components for just as long. I've been using premier, after effects, and Adobe media encoder longer than she's been using Photoshop. Adobe makes it pretty cheap to use their software. When they went to a monthly rate for their entire suite with free cloud based storage for $25 a month (I think it's a bit more expensive now) we jumped on it. The cloud storage alone is worth twice that.There's no way in hell I'd drop $500+ just on a processor and Intel has made it impossible for mid to low budget builders to afford 6+ cores. But with a pretty quick 6c/12t CPU, I'll be going with AMD for our next range of CPUs, which is coming soon. Sandy bridge is getting old. Just waiting for AM4 mITX.
calken99 - Wednesday, April 12, 2017 - link
Are you really telling me that the 70,000 i5 computers in the business that I work don't use any pro applications? That's just one small corporation. Businesses will dwarf the annual sales of CPUs in comparison to the domestic market.Meteor2 - Sunday, April 16, 2017 - link
I was trying to get some numbers on this. I think consumer computers outnumber corporate by a good two to one. Not sure the average age is that different either -- most places I've seen have been holding on to their PCs for years. Core 2s abound!