The AMD 2nd Gen Ryzen Deep Dive: The 2700X, 2700, 2600X, and 2600 Tested
by Ian Cutress on April 19, 2018 9:00 AM ESTCivilization 6
First up in our CPU gaming tests is Civilization 6. Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Civilization 6 has sliders for MSAA, Performance Impact and Memory Impact. The latter two refer to detail and texture size respectively, and are rated between 0 (lowest) to 5 (extreme). We run our Civ6 benchmark in position four for performance (ultra) and 0 on memory, with MSAA set to 2x.
For reviews where we include 8K and 16K benchmarks (Civ6 allows us to benchmark extreme resolutions on any monitor) on our GTX 1080, we run the 8K tests similar to the 4K tests, but the 16K tests are set to the lowest option for Performance.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Er look again Intel fanboisTechradar review with fully patched intel systems is showing exactly the same thing...
Spectre2 patch looks like it has a massive hit
Tropicocity - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Then why do other reviews not show even near the level of performance gap between Ryzen 1 and Ryzen 2? It's not as if spectre or meltdown patches would somehow make the 2 series way better than the 1fallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
XFR, ram, cooling, MCE, lots of variables hereBut the key difference is the patching and quite possibly the RAM
DearEmery - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I tend to keep away from the comments here because I lack the knowledge to really contribute.I couldn't resist the urge to pop in because I'm certain this is the only time that sentence will be me boasting, when I'm reading comments from 'kill3x' and 'realistz' concerning 'hard fails'.
Follow my great example and realize your anecdote (leaving aside your 'hard fail' comprehending results and placing them in context the article hands you plenty of, assuming you read every word you should have), is right on the edge of worthless and garbage. Then read all the comments (particularly page one and two). Then come back tomorrow to get potential updates. Then go back into whatever game you were playing and be silly gooses there.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Hey Kill3x,To clarify, are you looking at the same sub-score we are, or the overall average? Our posted results are off of the first scene, Valley, as that's the most strenuous. The overall average is going to be higher, as you can see here: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/GPU16/1471
kill3x - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Thank you for your reply, Ryan. Yes, this is more on point. But then again, if you mean Geothermal valley, I have different results there. The first area is Siberian wilderness with heavy snow, and I have lower results there. So a question arises about testing methods and testing scenes. Was it combat? Static? In a cave or on the top of area? All of these things affect FPS heavily. That's why the best way to review hardware in games is using scripted scenes and showing results in a video with detailed options' setup. Why didn't you guys just use ingame benchmark which 100% runs same scenes with same density? All of this looks like reviewer tried to cherrypick results in favor of Zen+. When you can't reproduce the result of a benchmark with same hardware as reviewer used is example of a bad approach and distortion of perception of your visitors.But then again, thank you, Ryan, for speaking with us and listening to our rant.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
"Why didn't you guys just use ingame benchmark which 100% runs same scenes with same density?"To clarify, we do. We just use one of the scenes, and not the average of all of them. This is the same scene we've used for over a year now, since introducing this benchmark to our CPU & mobo testing suite.
kill3x - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Ryan, I retested Valley scene in built-in benchmark, this time with 8700k and gtx 980 Ti. I used high instead of very high, all options like on your screenshot. I got 122 FPS on valley with this settings. On 980 Ti. I'm really trying to keep this polite, but this is 20% difference on marginally weaker card. This just can't be a "gap" kind of error. These benchmarks are horribly wrong. Make your site and Ian a favor, Ryan, please consider retesting this. People are already suspect you of shill (rightfully so). Be an honest guy and just admit that a technical mistake was made, and correct it. Noone would blame you, mistakes happen. If you leave that as it is, it will be a much bigger mistake.divertedpanda - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
Your setup is no where near similar to theirs. You can't use your PC to Bench vs Them, and call it scientific.......kill3x - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
Yeah my setup's is nowhere near similar to theirs, and still my results are 20% better on 2 different CPUs. That kinda puts credibility of their review to zero, with all my respect to Ryan. The only goal was to put Ryzen 1 and CFL-S CPUs in a bad light, so people will buy new Ryzen 2 CPUs and suddenly find out that its capability's are not that huge.