The AnandTech Coffee Lake Review: Initial Numbers on the Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400
by Ian Cutress on October 5, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i5
- Core i7
- Core i3
- 14nm
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Hex-Core
- Hyperthreading
Rise of the Tomb Raider
One of the newest games in the gaming benchmark suite is Rise of the Tomb Raider (RoTR), developed by Crystal Dynamics, and the sequel to the popular Tomb Raider which was loved for its automated benchmark mode. But don’t let that fool you: the benchmark mode in RoTR is very much different this time around.
Visually, the previous Tomb Raider pushed realism to the limits with features such as TressFX, and the new RoTR goes one stage further when it comes to graphics fidelity. This leads to an interesting set of requirements in hardware: some sections of the game are typically GPU limited, whereas others with a lot of long-range physics can be CPU limited, depending on how the driver can translate the DirectX 12 workload.
Where the old game had one benchmark scene, the new game has three different scenes with different requirements. These are three scenes designed to be taken from the game, but it has been noted that scenes like 2-Prophet shown in the benchmark can be the most CPU limited elements of that entire level, and the scene shown is only a small portion of that level. Because of this, we report the results for each scene on each graphics card separately.
Graphics options for RoTR are similar to other games in this type, offering some presets or allowing the user to configure texture quality, anisotropic filter levels, shadow quality, soft shadows, occlusion, depth of field, tessellation, reflections, foliage, bloom, and features like PureHair which updates on TressFX in the previous game.
Again, we test at 1920x1080 and 4K using our native 4K displays. At 1080p we run the High preset, while at 4K we use the Medium preset which still takes a sizable hit in frame rate.
It is worth noting that RoTR is a little different to our other benchmarks in that it keeps its graphics settings in the registry rather than a standard ini file, and unlike the previous TR game the benchmark cannot be called from the command-line. Nonetheless we scripted around these issues to automate the benchmark four times and parse the results. From the frame time data, we report the averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
#1 Geothermal Valley Spine of the Mountain
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
#2 Prophet’s Tomb
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
#3 Spine of the Mountain GeoThermal Valley
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
The 8700K did not seem to play nicely with RoTR. We'll go back and check this.
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boeush - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
To expand on this a bit more, with the "core wars" now in effect, I wonder if hyperthreading might be an unnecessary holdover feature that could be actually reducing performance of many(8+)-core chips in all but the most extremely threaded scenarios. Might it not be better to have many simple/efficient cores, rather than perhaps fewer cores loaded with the hyperthreading overhead both in terms of die area and energy density, as well as cache thrashing?Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Hyperthreading was invented to optimize the use of CPU logic that would otherwise remain unutilized during high loads.There is no way of reducing performance with current architectures. There are "hyperthreading-less" CPUs and you compare them to hyperthreded CPUs.boeush - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Hyperthreading was particularly useful in the context of not having a lot of cores to work with - allowing to squeeze extra multi-threaded performance from your dual- or quad-core CPU. It comes at the cost of extra silicon and complexity in the CPU pipeline, but allows better utilization of CPU resources as you mention. At runtime, it has the dual detrimental effects on single-thread performance, of (1) splitting/sharing the on-CPU cache among more threads, thereby raising the frequency of cache misses for any given thread due to the threads trampling over each other's cached data, and (2) indeed maximizing CPU resource utilization, thereby maximizing dissipated energy per unit area - and thereby driving the CPU into a performance-throttling regime.With more cores starting to become available per CPU in this age of "core wars", it's no longer as important to squeeze every last ounce of resource utilization from each core. Most workloads/applications are not very parallelizable in practice, so you end up hitting the limits of Amdahl's law - at which point single-thread performance becomes the main bottleneck. And to maximize single-thread performance on any given core, you need two things: (a) maximum attainable clock frequency (resource utilization be damned), and (b) as much uncontested, dedicated on-CPU cache as you can get. Hyperthreading is an impediment to both of those goals.
So, it seems to me that if we're going toward the future where we routinely have CPUs with 8 or more cores, then it would be beneficial for each of those cores to be simpler, more compact, more streamlined and optimized for single-thread performance (while foregoing hyperthreading support), while spending any resulting die space savings on more cores and/or more cache.
boeush - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
To add to the above: 'more cores and/or more cache' - and/or better branch predictor, and/or faster/wider ALU and/or FPU, and/or more pipeline stages to support a faster clock, and/or...alinypd - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Slowest GAMING CPU Ever, Garbage!yhselp - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
The i3-8100 is made utterly redundant by the the necessity to buy a Z370 motherboard along with it; it'd be cheaper to get an i5-7400 with a lower-end motherboard. Intel...watzupken - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
This applies to all the non-overclocking chips, particularly i5 and below. The high cost of the Z370 boards currently simply wipe out any price benefits. For example, a i5 840 is good value for money, but once you factor in the price of a motherboard with a Z370 chipset, it may not be that good value for money anymore.FourEyedGeek - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Enjoyed the article, thanks. An overclocked Ryzen 1700 looks appealing.nierd - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
"The problem here is *snip* Windows 10, *snip* All it takes is for a minor internal OS blip and single-threaded performance begins to diminish. Windows 10 famously kicks in a few unwanted instruction streams when you are not looking,"This is why single threaded performance is a silly benchmark in today's market, unless you happen to boot to DOS to run something. Your OS is designed to use threads. There are no systems in use today as a desktop (in any market these processors will compete - even if used as a server) where they will ever run a single thread. The only processors that run single threads today are ... single core processors (without hyperthreading even).
Open your task manager - click the performance tab - look at the number of threads - when you have enough cores to match that number then single threaded performance is important. In the real world how the processor handles multiple tasks and thread switching is more important. Even hardcore gamers seem to miss this mark forgetting that behind the game the OS has threads for memory management, disk management, kernel routines, checking every piece of hardware in your system, antivirus, anti-malware (perhaps), network stack management, etc. That's not even counting if you run more than one monitor and happen to have web browsing or videos playing on another screen - and anything in the background you are running.
The myth that you never need more than 4 cores is finally coming to rest - lets start seeing benchmarks that stress a system with 10 programs going in the background. My system frequently will be playing a movie, playing a game, and running handbrake in the background while it also serves as a plex server, runs antivirus, has 32 tabs open in 2 different browsers, and frequently has something else playing at the same time - A true benchmark would be multiple programs all tying up as many resources as possible - while a single app can give a datapoint I want to see how these new multi-core beasts handle real world scenarios and response times.
coolhardware - Sunday, October 8, 2017 - link
Your comment has merit. It is crazy the number of tasks running on a modern OS. I sometimes miss the olden days where a clean system truly was clean and had minimal tasks upon bootup. ;-)