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
Ashes of the Singularity Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four-minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, and time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
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xchaotic - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Well yeah, but even with non-HT i5 and i3, you still have plenty of cores to work with.Even if the OS (or a background task - say Windows Defender?) takes up a thread, you still have other cores for your game engine.nierd - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Do we? I've yet to see a good benchmark that measures task switching and multiple workloads - they measure 'program a' that is bad at using cores - and 'program b' that is good at using cores.In today's reality - few people are going to need maximum single program performance. Outside of very specific types of workloads (render farming or complex simulations for science) please show me the person that is just focused on a single program. I want to see side by side how these chips square off when you have multiple completing workloads that force the scheduler to balance tasks and do multiple context shifting etc. We used to see benchmarks back in the day (single core days) where they'd do things like run a program designed to completely trash the predictive cache so we'd see 'worst case' performance, and things that would stress a cpu. Now we run a benchmark suite that shows you how fast handbrake runs *if it's the only thing you run*.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
I wonder if there's pressure never to test systems in that kind of real-world manner, perhaps the results would not be pretty. Not so much a damnation of the CPU, rather a reflection of the OS. :D Windows has never been that good at this sort of thing.boeush - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
An *intelligent* OS thread scheduler would group low-demand/low-priority threads together, to multitask on one or two cores, while placing high-priority and high-CPU-utilization threads on respective dedicated cores. This would maximize performance and avoid trashing the cache, where and when it actually matters.If Windows 10 makes consistent single-thread performance hard to obtain, then the testing is revealing a fundamental problem (really, a BUG) with the OS' scheduler - not a flaw in benchmarking methodology...
samer1970 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I fail to understand how you guys review a CPU meant for overclocking and only put non OC results in your tables ?If I wanted the i7 8700K without overclocking I would pick up the i7 8700 ans save $200 for both cooling and cheaper motherboard. and the i7 8700 can turbo all 6 cores to 4.3Ghz just like the i7 8700K
someonesomewherelse - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link
Classic Intel, can't they make a chipset/socket with extra power pins so it would last for at least a few cpu generations?Gastec - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link
I'm getting lost in all these CPU releases this year, it feels like there is a new CPU coming out every 2 months. Don't get me wrong, I like to have many choices but this is pathetic really. Someone is really desperate for more money.zodiacfml - Sunday, October 15, 2017 - link
The i3!lordken - Saturday, October 28, 2017 - link
cant you make bars for amd cpus red in graphs? Its crap to search for them if all lines are black (at least 7700k was highlighted in some)a bit disappointed, not a single world of ryzen/amd on summary page, you compare only to intel cpus? how come?
why only 1400 in civ AI test and not any R7/5 CPUs?
Also I would expect you hammer down intel a bit more on that not-so-same socket crap.
Ritska - Friday, November 3, 2017 - link
Why is 6800k faster then 7700k and 8700k in gaming? Is it worth buying if I can get one for 300$?