Launching the #CPUOverload Project: Testing Every x86 Desktop Processor since 2010
by Dr. Ian Cutress on July 20, 2020 1:30 PM ESTGaming Tests: Strange Brigade
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt, and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen, who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark as an on-rails experience through the game. For quality, the game offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. Strange Brigade supports Vulkan and DX12, and so we test on both.
- 720p Low
- 1440p Low
- 4K Low
- 1080p Ultra
The automation for Strange Brigade is one of the easiest in our suite – the settings and quality can be changed by pre-prepared .ini files, and the benchmark is called via the command line. The output includes all the frame time data.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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| 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.