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
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low-end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
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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.