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.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
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techguymaxc - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Either you don't have a fast enough GPU to remove the GPU bottleneck or there's something wrong with your data because there is NO chance Ryzen is faster than *lake in GTA V, with lower IPC and clocks.Don't get me wrong, Ryzen 2 looks like a good product family and I wouldn't discourage anyone from buying.
SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
As everyone else that are misreading the results. Tests are done at stock speeds and no overclocking.LurkingSince97 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Yes there is.Stock CPU and RAM speeds. Fully spectre / meltdown patched on both sides. Who is re-using old results? This review re-uses old results for the older generation Ryzen, and so some of the performance boost could be false (new drivers, OS patches, firmware, bios....).
More investigation is needed on all sides. Many other review sites are significantly more lazy than AT and are likely recycling old results for the Intel side.
As for your GPU bottleneck.... um no. Look at the results, as the resolution goes up, THEN you get GPU bottlenecked and all CPUs look the same. At low resolutions, it is clearly not GPU bottlenecked as there is a big FPS difference by CPU.
jaydee - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Great review. Curious to see how things scale down for a 35W TDP part compared to Intel's latest 35W TDP CPUs.SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Gamers Nexus have tested the 2700X to work at 1.175V locked to 4.1GHz where it consumes 129W compared to stock frequency and stock voltage where it consumes 200W. Performance is generally the same on average.Flunk - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Wow, that single-thread performance delta sure has shrunk hasn't it? Between meltdown and higher core clocks on the Zen+.mapesdhs - Saturday, April 21, 2018 - link
Wonder whether it won't be that much longer until AMD launches something which actually beats Intel in IPC. Atm, people keep saying Intel wins on IPC, but it's only because Intel has punched its clock rates through the roof (it's like the old P4 days again), something they could have done years ago but never bothered because there was no competition, just as they could have released a consumer 8-core long ago but didn't (the 3930K was a crippled 8-core, but back then AMD couldn't even beat mainstream SB, never mind SB-E).mkaibear - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
You know IPC is "instructions per clock", yeah? So saying Intel wins on IPC because their clock rate is faster doesn't make sense, it's like saying UK cars have a higher mpg then US cars because their gallons are bigger.Intel wins (won?) on IPC because they executed more instructions per MHz of the clock rate. When you couple that with a faster clock rate you get a double whammy of performance. It does appear that AMD has almost closed the door on IPC but is still not operating on as high a clock rate.
Targon - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
This is why many are looking forward to Zen 2 in 2019, which will have true design improvements compared to Zen and Zen+. Zen+ is a small and incremental improvement over Zen(first generation Ryzen chips). Combined with 7nm, we may very well see AMD get very close to Intel clock speeds while having very similar, if not better IPC and a higher core count.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Looks like a good review. Glad to see AMD closing the performance gap even further!