Civilization 6

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 fourth 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.

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance


1080p

4K

8K
 
16K
 

ASUS GTX 1060 Strix 6G Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro R9 Fury 4G Performance


1080p

4K

Sapphire Nitro RX 480 8G Performance


1080p

4K

On the whole, the Threadripper CPUs perform as well as Ryzen does on most of the tests, although the Time Under analysis always seems to look worse for Threadripper.

Benchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests CPU Gaming Performance: Ashes of the Singularity Escalation (1080p, 4K)
Comments Locked

347 Comments

View All Comments

  • launchcodemexico - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Why did you end all the gaming review sections with something like "Switching it to Game mode would have made better numbers..."? Why didn't you run the benchmarks in Gaming mode in the first place?
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Gaming mode is not default, and we run gaming mode alongside the default - there's two sets of values in each graming test.
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    You might want to call that out more clearly in the text. I also missed that you have two sets of 1950X results; and probably wouldn't've figured out what the -G suffix meant without a hint.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    I mentioned it in the Game vs Creator mode page, but I'll propagate it through.
  • lordken - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    read before you complain, it is stated at beginning of the review that -G is for game mode...
  • DanNeely - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    Especially during the work day a lot of people just are doing quick glances at the most interesting parts. I'll end to end read it sometime tonight.
  • mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    If people quick-glance, that's their problem for missing key info. :D When learning about something as new as this, I read everything. Otherwise, it's like the tech equivalent of crossing a road while gawping at a phone. :}

    Last time I read so much about a new CPU launch was Nehalem/X58.

    Ian.
  • smilingcrow - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    It seemed really clear to me but for people who didn't read the long text on NUMA etc maybe not.
    The dangers of skimming!
  • mapesdhs - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link

    Indeed. :D Reminds me of when a long time ebay seller told me that long item decriptions are pointless, because most bidders only read the first paragraph, often only the first sentence.
  • Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link

    The test suite is a global glove: rather than have 20 tests for each segment, it's a global band of 80 tests for every situation. Johan does different tests as his office is several hundred miles away from where I am (and we're thousands of miles away from any other reviewer).

    For the gaming benchmarks, there are big differences in 99th percentile frame rates and Time Under analysis. As games become more and more GPU bottlenecked for average frame rates, this is where the differentiation point is. It's a reason why we still test 1080p as well. With regards the AI test, I've asked the Civ team repeatedly to make the AI test accessible from the command line so I can rope it into my testing scripts easily (they already do it with the main GPU test). But like many other game studios, getting them to unlock a flag is a frustrating endeavor when they don't even respond to messages.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now