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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MDD1963 - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
The Gskill 32 GB kit (2 x 16 GB/3200 MHz) I bought 13 months ago for $205 is now $400-ish...andychow - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Ridiculous comment. 7 years ago I bought 4x8 GB of RAM for $110. That same kit, from the same company, seven years later, now sells for $300. 4x16GB kits are around $800. Memory prices aren't at all the way they've always been. There is clear collusion going on. Micron and SK Hynix have both seen their stock price increase 400% in the last two years. 400%!!!!!The price of RAM just keeps increasing and increasing, and the 3 manufacturers are in no hurry to increase supply. They are even responsible for the lack of GPUs, because they are the bottleneck.
spdragoo - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
You mean a price history like this?https://camelcamelcamel.com/Corsair-Vengeance-4x8G...
Or perhaps, as mentioned here (https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/what-ha... how the previous-generation RAM tends to go up in price once the manufacturers switch to the next-gen?
Since I KNOW you're not going to claim that you bought DDR4 RAM 7 YEARS AGO (when it barely came out 4 years ago)...
Alexvrb - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
I love how you ignored everyone that already smushed your talking points to focus on a post which was likely just poorly worded.RAM prices have traditionally gone DOWN over time for the same capacity, as density improves. But recently the limited supply has completely blown up the normal price-per-capacity-over-time curve. Profit margins are massive. Saying this is "the same as always" is beyond comprehension. If it wasn't for your reply I would have sworn you were simply trolling.
Anyway this is what a lack of genuine competition looks like. NAND market isn't nearly as bad but there's supply problems there too.
vext - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
True. When prices double with no explanation, there must be collusion.The same thing has happened with videocards. I have great doubts about bitcoin mining as a driver for those price increases. If mining was so profitable, you would think there would be a mad scramble to design cards specifically for mining. Instead the load falls on the DYI consumer.
Something very odd is happening.
Alexvrb - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
They DO design things specifically for mining. It's called an ASIC miner. Unfortunately for us, some currencies are ASIC-resistant, and in some cases they can potentially change the algorithm, which makes such (expensive!) development challenging.Samus - Friday, April 20, 2018 - link
Yep. I went with 16GB in 2013-2014 just because I was like meh what difference does $50-$60 make when building a $1000+ PC. These days I do a double take when choosing between 8GB and 16GB for PC's I build. Even hardcore gaming PC's don't *NEED* more than 8GB, so it's worth saving $100+Memory prices have nearly doubled in the last 5 years. Sure there is cheap ram, there always has been. But a kit of quality Gskill costs twice as much as a comparable kit of quality Gskill cost in 2012.
FireSnake - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Awesome, as always. Happy reading! :)Chris113q - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Your gaming benchmarks results are garbage and every other reviewer got different results than you did. I hope no one takes this review seriously as the data is simply incorrect and misleading.Ian Cutress - Thursday, April 19, 2018 - link
Always glad to see you offer links to show the differences.We ran our tests on a fresh version of RS3 + April Security Updates + Meltdown/Spectre patches using our standard testing implementation.