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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mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
Any idea what that optimisation is? Seems odd that adding extra pure cores would harm performance, as opposed to adding HT which some games don't play nice with. Otherwise, are you saying that for this test, if it was present, the i3 8100 would come out on top? Blimey.Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
They're either doing something to align certain CPU tasks for AVX, or it's bypassing code. You'd have to ask the developers on that.mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
I doubt they'd explain what's happening, might be proprietory code or something.WickedMONK3Y - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
You have the spec of the i7 8700K slightly wrong. It has a base frequency of 3.7GHz not 3.8GHz.https://ark.intel.com/products/126684/Intel-Core-i...
Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Mistake on our part. I was using our previous news post as my source and that had a Typo. This review (and that news) should be updated now.Slomo4shO - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Ian, this is probably your worst review to date. Lackluster choice of CPUs, mid-grade GPU, and lack of direct competition in the product stack... Why would you not use a GTX 1080 Ti or Titan XP?Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
All the CPUs we've ever tested are in Bench. Plenty of other data in there: the goal was to not put 30+ CPUs into every graph.Our benchmark database includes over 40 CPUs tested on the GTX 1080, which is the most powerful GPU I could get a set of so I can do parallel testing across several systems. If that wasn't enough (a full test per CPU takes 5 hours per GPU), the minute I get better GPUs I would have to start retesting every CPU. At the exclusion of other content. Our benchmark suite was updated in early Q2, and we're sticking with that set of GPUs (GTX 1080/1060/R9 Fury/RX 480) for a good while for that reason.
Note I had three days to do this review.
crimson117 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Good job! More people need to know about the bench...Slomo4shO - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
To be fair the R5 1600 was added to the benches after the fact. In addition, your othwr reviews tend to be much more detailed and data driven with relevant products and multiple GPUs.Why would I read your review if you expect me to dig through your benchmark to obtain relivant data?
I can understand and appreciate the time crunch but it is a poor excuse for some of the decisions made in this review.
Take it with a grain of salt, this was not your best work.
mapesdhs - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
Ooohhh the effort of examing the data in Bench! :D First world problems. Sheesh...Run your own tests then, see how you get on with having a life. It's insanely time consuming.