Civilization 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


1080p

4K

8K

16K

Benchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests Gaming Performance: Shadow of Mordor
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  • peevee - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link

    I mean, Octane test in Chrome is what V8 javascript compiler does. And it itself is build with MSVC AFAIR.
  • Dragonstongue - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link

    just looking back at this, you say according to title 2700x-2700-2600x-2600 and yet in most tests are only listing the results for 2700x-2600x..not good for someone really wanting to see the differences in power use or performance comparing them head to head sort of speak.

    seems the 2700 would be a "good choice" as according to the little bit of info given about it, it ends up using less power than the 2600 even though rated same TDP with 2 extra core 4 extra threads O.O

    I do "hope" the sellers such as amazon at least for us Canadian folk stick closer to the price they should be vs tacking on $15-$25 or more compared to MSRP pricing, seems if one bought them same day of launch pricing was right where it should be.

    1600 has bounced around a little bit whereas 1600x is actually a fair price compared to what it was "very tempting" though the lack of a boxed cooler is not good.....shame 2600 only comes with wraith stealth instead of spire seeing as the price is SOOO close (not to mention at least launch price vs what the 1xxx generation is NOW, AMD should have been extra nice and bundled the wraith spire for 2600-2600x and wraith LED and wraith max or whatever for the 2700-2700x

    I would imagine if they decide to do a 4 core 8 thread 2xxx that would be the spot to use the wraith spire (less heat load via less cores type deal)
  • 29a - Thursday, April 26, 2018 - link

    Not trying to be sarcastic but will this article be finished? I really wanted to read the storage and chipset info. If the article is as complete as it is going to get please let us know, 20 year reader asking.
  • John_M - Saturday, April 28, 2018 - link

    I'm sure it will be finished one day but I agree that it doesn't seem so at the moment. If you want to find out about StoreMI AMD has a page about it: https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/store-mi
  • ET - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - link

    I think we've got ourselves a race: which will get here first, the missing parts of the 2nd gen Ryzen review, or new Raven Ridge drivers? Or perhaps hell will freeze first.
  • 29a - Friday, May 4, 2018 - link

    Sadly it appears as though the article will not be finished. This site was great during about its first 15 years of existence, Purch has done a thorough job of purching it up.
  • jor5 - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - link

    Oh dear what an embarrassing end to this article.

    Tuck it away under "what was I thinking??" and pretend it never happened.
  • x0fff8 - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - link

    is this article ever gonna get updated with the new benchmarks?
  • MDD1963 - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link

    And just like that, my 7700K is fast again! :)
  • peevee - Thursday, May 10, 2018 - link

    "Technically the details of the chipset are also covered by the April 19th embargo, so we cannot mention exactly what makes them different to the X370 platform until then"

    That was written for the article published April 19th, and as of May 10th STILL in the text.

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