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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SaturnusDK - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Surely you mean widening the performance gap. It was already ahead in professional and multi-threaded workloads. Now it's miles ahead.MajGenRelativity - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I was referring to single-threaded performance. As for multi-threaded workloads, you are rightfallaha56 - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Like which ones?After the Spectre2 patch the Intel scores have been hammered...
And no doubt with proper default settings on MCE as well
jjj - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Very odd choice to only include the Intels with high clocks in the charts, it's like you wanted to put all Intels at top in ST results, make it look better than it is.Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
I'm afraid there are physical space limits regarding how much hardware Ian can fit in his domain. It's been popular to recycle scores from previous tests among sites, but after "Smeltdown" (and with Nvidia drivers being all over the place) it doesn't work that way right now. In an ideal world you'd compare five or ten different setups, sure.But then you'd not just want 8400 @ B360 but also 8700k OC, 2600k OC, 4770k OC, etc...
T1beriu - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Typo: "Cycling back to that Cinebench R15 nT result that showed a 122% gain". I think the gain is just 22%.SirCanealot - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Wow. I'm actually excited to read a review for the first time in a long time! Fantastic review as usual!I'm still sitting on my 3770k @ 4-4-4.7ghz and I'm likely to try delidding for fun and see if I can push it any more. But this review makes me excited to look forward to perhaps building a Ryzen 2/3 (whatever the heck they name it) this time next year!
AMD has caught up to Intel another vital few paces here! If Intel sits on their butts again next year and AMD can do the same thing next year, this is going to get very, very interesting :)
SmCaudata - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
I'm sitting on a 2500k. The geek in me wants to upgrade, but I've really no need until Cyberpunk finally releases. Maybe zen 5 by that time.Lolimaster - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
You can upgrade to the new 400 mobos, it will be compatible with any Ryzen released till 2020.Luckz - Monday, April 23, 2018 - link
Four times the threads though, four times.Depends on what you do, of course :)