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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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?