The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and 1920X Review: CPUs on Steroids
by Ian Cutress on August 10, 2017 9:00 AM ESTCivilization 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.
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ddriver - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Yeah if all you do all day is compile chromium with visual studio... Take that result with a big spoon of salt.Samus - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
This thing can also decompress my HD pr0n RARs in record time!carewolf - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The jokes is on you. More cores and more memory bandwidth is always faster for compiling. Anandtech must have butched the benchmark here. Other sites show ThreadRipper whipping i9 ass as expected.bongey - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
They did without a doubt screw up the compile test. The 6950x is a 10 core /20 thread intel cpu, but somehow the 7900x has 20% improvement, when no other test even comes close to that much of an improvement. The 7900x is basically just bump in clock speed for a 6950x.Ian Cutress - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
'The 7900X is basically just bump in clock speed for a 6950X'L2 cache up to 1MB, L3 cache is a victim cache, mesh interconnect rather than rings.
mlambert890 - Saturday, August 12, 2017 - link
It's basically as far from 'just a bump in clock speed' as any follow up release short of a full architecture revamp, but yeah ok.rtho782 - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
The whole game mode/creator mode, UMA/NUMA, etc seems a mess. Games not working with more than 20 threads is a joke although not AMDs fault....mapesdhs - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
Why is it a mess if peope choose to buy into this level of tech? It's bring formerly Enterprise-level tech to the masses, the very nature of how this stuff works makes it clear there are tradeoffs in design. AMD is forced to start off by dealing with a sw market that for years has focused on the prevalence of moderately low core count Intel CPUs with strong(er) IPC. Offering a simple hw choice to tailor the performance slant is a nice idea. I mean, what's your problem here? Do you not understand UMA vs. NUMA? If not, probably shouldn't be buying this level of tech. :DprisonerX - Thursday, August 10, 2017 - link
That will change. Why invest masses of expensive brainpower in aggressively multithreading your game or app when no-one has the hardware to use it? No they do.Hurr Durr - Friday, August 11, 2017 - link
Only in lala-land will HEDT processors occupy any meaningful part of the gaming market. We`re bound by consoles, and that is here to stay for years.