Launching the #CPUOverload Project: Testing Every x86 Desktop Processor since 2010
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 20, 2020 1:30 PM ESTGaming Tests: Civilization 6
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civilization 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 underflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but I have played every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, and 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.
For this benchmark, we are using the following settings:
- 480p Low
- 1440p Low
- 4K Low
- 1080p Max
For automation, Firaxis supports the in-game automated benchmark from the command line, and output a results file with frame times. We call the game, wait until the file is created, pull it out and regex the relevant data. For the in-game settings, because Civ 6 seems to require the hardware from the last run to be the same as the current run else it defaults to base settings, we delete the settings file, run the benchmark once, and then use regex on the generated settings files to call the relevant resolutions and quality settings. We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages and percentiles.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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29a - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Please remove Egomark from the benchmark list.Meteor2 - Monday, August 3, 2020 - link
Why?Mr Perfect - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Reading through the OS preparation section, I kind of wonder if setting up a domain would be helpful?Joining a test PC to a domain would allow all of those settings to be configured through GPO instead of running tons of batch files and scripts. You'd also gain the ability to point Windows Update at a WSUS server, where you control what updates are even shown to the PC (in your case, probably none). Throw in the ability to remotely run scripts with Domain Administrator accounts, and you could probably skip around those UAC prompts too.
It would be a lot of setup the first time around, but it does point to that automation-eventually-pays-off thing.
Icehawk - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Very cool!Would like to see your handbrake HEVC encoding done via software with no vendor encoder - it’s the only way you guys can be getting those crazy fps numbers. I don’t want to see how a vendor encoder runs, I want to see how the CPU runs - and those hardware ones are still worse than software so I do not use them even though it is a massive speed boost.
extide - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Using vector instructions like AVX is still "software" encoding. It's fully CPU, and not at all a lower quality hardware encoder.faizoff - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Until I upgraded from an HD 6870 to an RX 580 recently I had no idea GPUs had dedicated encoders. I've tried them and they are definitely faster than the CPU, the same file that I tried got well over 40 fps compared to the 5 fps when choosing the CPU encoder.The caveat was that the GPU encoded files were much larger in size with comparable quality.
lmcd - Tuesday, July 21, 2020 - link
There's ways to push file size back down afaik.Meteor2 - Monday, August 3, 2020 - link
Not with hardware encoding.jaminvi - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Looks great from here. Good cross section of test. Looking forward to it.catavalon21 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
This is outstanding. Very much like the stuff on this site back in this site's early days, like comparing Pentium performance with and without MMX. Comparing the performance between VX and HX chipsets. Tip of the hat, old man.