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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mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
You know what will happen there though, yet more accusations of conspiracy, etc.lfred - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Could anyone confirm the Wraith Prism cooler height 9.4cm , (and therefore wont fit a Silverstone Raven Z Mini-ITX case ) . thank youpsychok9 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Hello Ian, is there any news this week?ET - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
I'm still waiting for the StoreMI page.Sx57 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Well i am still waiting for anandtech updating the article.i am very interested to know how ryzen beat coffelake so well.i believe anandtech review is perfomed rightly but i wanna know what is actually wrong with other reviews that make intel winner in some games.it seems not to be the security patches related.FaultierSid - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Did they just silently switch out all gaming benchmarks? Intel 8700K now winning across the board.rocky12345 - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Yep they sure did they must have redone the tsts but this time turned on MCE for Intel and upped the memory clock to at least 3200MHz for Intel as well to see those kinds of gains in games from the old charts from last week. If they decide to explain it they will spin it that oh they had the wrong data points in the charts for Intel...lolTEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Yes .. at 1080P. The 4K gaming results are rather mixed. So the original conclusion still stands for me. The AMD Ryzen 2700X is roughly on par with the 8700K at 4K gaming, and pulls ahead in productivity applications.RafaelHerschel - Wednesday, April 25, 2018 - link
Here is how I see it, at 1080p the new Ryzen results are good enough for 60 FPS gaming. The 2600 (non-x model) sometimes drops below 60 FPS but for a system that is equally used for productivity and gaming, I can certainly live with that. For a system that is mainly used for gaming, I still prefer Intel, but by a slimmer margin than before.mapesdhs - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
You are hereby awarded the Sensible Chap medal for mentioning 60Hz gaming in at least a non-negtive manner. 8) A few pages back, one guy described anything below 144Hz as useless.