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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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.