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 |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
110 Comments
View All Comments
vasily - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
You might want to check out Phoronix Test Suite and openbenchmarking.org.https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/
https://openbenchmarking.org/
colinisation - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
would love to see the following processors added5775C (overclocked to 4Ghz) - just purely to see what impact the eDRAM has on workloads
4770K
7600K
Phenom II X4
Highest Bulldozer core
VIA's highest performance x86 core
faizoff - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
What a gargantuan project this is going to be. And I cannot wait, oddly enough I've been using the bench tool the past few weeks to get a sense of how much difference an upgrade for me would make.I am probably one of the many (or few) people that have still held on to their i5 2500k and this is one of the places I can select that CPU and compare the benchmarks with newer releases.
This project looks to be an amazing read once all done and will be especially looking forward to those segments "how well does x CPU run today?"
Alim345 - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Are you going to make benchmark scripts available? They should be useful for individual comparisons, since many users might have overclocked CPUs which were more common in 2010-2015.brantron - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Just to fill out the starting set:7700K needs a common AMD counterpart, i.e. Ryzen 2600
Sandy or Ivy Bridge i7
Haswell i7
That would also make for a good article, as it should be possible to overclock any of those to ~4.5 GHz for a more apples to apples comparison.
StormyParis - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Thank you for that. My main question is not "what should I buy" because that's always very well covered, and on a fixed budget there's never much choice anyway, but "should I upgrade *now* which is only worth it when last time's amount of money gets you at least 2x performance. I'ive got a 7yo Core i5... I'll look into it !eastcoast_pete - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Ian, thanks for this!One aspect I've wondered about for a while is whether you could include performance/Watt in your tests and comparisons going forward? I know that's usually done for server CPUs, but I also find it of interest for desktop and laptop CPUs.
thebigteam - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
I think I have the below list of Intel CPUs available if needed, likely with working mobos too. Would be very happy to clean out the closet and get these to you guys :) Likely some 2009/2010 Athlons as wellE8400
i3 530
i3 540
i5 760
i5 2500
i5 4670K
inighthawki - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Thank you so much for changing your gaming benchmark methodology. I tend to play my games at 1440p on lowest settings for maximum framerates, which is far more often than not CPU bound. It was always so annoying seeing the benchmarks be GPU bound when I'm trying to see how much a new CPU helps.Smell This - Monday, July 20, 2020 - link
Chicken(lol)
With AM3, AM2+ and AM2 processors, AM3+ processors broke backwards-compatibility.
A mobo like the MSI 790FX K9A2 Platinum transitioned nearly 250 processors from S754-939, to AM2-AM3, beginning with the single-core Athlon 64 3000+ 'Orleans' up to the PhII x6 DDR3 Thubans.
These were the progeny of the K8 or 'Hammer' projects. A Real Man would never leave them behind ...
https://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-MSI/K9A2_Platinum_%...