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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Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Should be sorted now. Found a small issue, pages should be loading in sub 2 seconds.anubis44 - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
"Not sure why there is no R5 1600 in the test though. It will be good to see how the 6 cores solution compete."It's essentially as you'd expect. In older, single-threaded code, the Intel CPU has a slight advantage, but in any newer, multi-threaded code, the Ryzen 5 1600's hyperthreading 6 cores will dominate. It's time to stop giving Intel money for fewer cores. They don't deserve the cash. Give it to AMD for a change, now that they're genuinely competitive.
rtho782 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Annnd stock is unpossible to find...Complete paper launch.
Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Newegg seems to be accepting orders.rtho782 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I'm british! :POcUK put all their allocation (30 pcs) into binned delidded cpus at £499/£599/£799
The others are all gone.
krumme - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
8700k is in backorder there. And for the rest of the world?I can get a 8400 in my country. 8700k seems to come 2 dec.
I cant remember anything similar for the last 3 decades. Perhaps the P3-1000.
If this is not a paper launch nothing is.
bill.rookard - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
If you want a P3-1000 I have one I can sell you! Fully working with motherboard. LOL. I think it also has a whopping 256MB RAM.watzupken - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I think I read somewhere that mentioned that supply will be limited, especially at the start.mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
Gotta love the way searching on Amazon for 8700K brings back the 7700K (as opposed to simply, Not Found). By grud their search engine is bad. :DFourEyedGeek - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Bad for them?