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
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Zingam - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Not everybody has a rich daddy! Performance per dollar matters in all areas of life!It doesn't matter to very, very rich people or sucker fanboys!
mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
Again the myth that rich people don't care about wasting money. So wrong. :D As for fanboyism, that kind of label gets hurled in both directions, but IRL has little meaning.Gothmoth - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
an overlcocked ryzen 1700 is bit for bit the best choice.. still.except for hardcore gamers.
and i bet intel paid you quite a bit to ignore stuff other (less intel biased) reviewers pointed out today.
mkaibear - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Ryzen has no integrated GPU so it can't be the best choice for anyone without a discrete GPU (aka the vast majority of the market - about 70% as per q1 2017). Ironically the gamers are the ones more likely to snap up Ryzen as they have discrete graphics cards anyway...Ananke - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I see the same, ryzen 1700 remains the best buy, followed by ryzen 1600, which recent batches seems to have 8 cores instead of 6, for around $170. They do come with heatsink, another $30 saved. With ok board it will total $250. Even better, readily built Dell gaming desktops can achieve around $800 with r580 8gb and 16 GB ram with 1700 ryzen vs above $1100 for similar Intel. It is literally no brainer choiceGastec - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link
Wow there, rewind! "Ryzen 1600, which recent batches seems to have 8 cores instead of 6". Care to explain more?Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
"and i bet intel paid you quite a bit to ignore stuff other (less intel biased) reviewers pointed out today."You'd lose that bet.
Now since we're apparently doing this Jeopardy style, please tell me how much you wagered so that I know how much I'm collecting. Since Intel isn't paying me, you will have to do. ;-)
In all seriousness though, taking sides and taking bribes would be a terrible way to run a business. Trust is everything, so losing the trust of you guys (the readers) would be about the worst possible thing we could do.
FourEyedGeek - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Are you happy for an overclocked Ryzen 1700 to be compared against overclocked Intel processors as well?gnufied - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Your bench pages are either loading very slowly or displaying Gateway timeout.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Thanks. Having the server team look into it.