Intel NUC8i7HVK (Hades Canyon) Gaming Performance - A Second Look
by Ganesh T S on May 14, 2018 8:01 AM ESTGaming Performance - Grand Theft Auto V
GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence.
We processed the benchmark across various resolutions and quality settings. The results are presented below. Further down, we have the various differing aspects in the settings for each set.
| Grand Theft Auto V Performance | |||
In almost all cases, the trend is as expected. In the 1080p case with low quality settings, the performance seems to be CPU-limited, allowing the Hades Canyon NUC to match the more powerful systems. The game seems to be friendly to the Hades Canyon NUC only in the low quality settings.
| Grand Theft Auto V - Evaluated Quality Settings | ||||||
| Aspect | 720p Max | 1080p Low | 1080p Max | 1440p VHigh | 4K Low | 4K High |
| Screen Resolution | 1280 x 720 | 1920 x 1080 | 1920 x 1080 | 2560 x 1440 | 3840 x 2160 | 3840 x 2160 |
| Reflection MSAA | 8 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 8 |
| MSAA | 8 | 0 | 4 | 4 | 0 | 8 |
| Tessellation | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Shadow Quality | 3 | 1 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 3 |
| Reflection Quality | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| SSAO | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Anisotropic Filtering | 16 | 0 | 16 | 16 | 0 | 16 |
| Texture Quality | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Particle Quality | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Water Quality | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Grass Quality | 3 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 0 | 3 |
| Shader Quality | 2 | 0 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Soft Shadows | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Ultra & Long Shadows | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
| FXAA | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
| PostFX | 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| DoF | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
| HdStreamingInFlight | Y | N | Y | Y | N | Y |
| MaxLodScale | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
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eva02langley - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Well, I think AMD might have wanted to keep their Vega trump card for their own APUs, which I believe is the right thing to do from business standpoint.Anyway, another Intel attempt that comes short of anything except just a proof of concept.
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If that's the case, then we haven't seen AMD's solution here.Intel's "G" chips with Vega graphics have HBM2 memory on-package, while AMD's APUs just use system memory. That certainly has cost (and power) advantages, but it also means the APUs don't perform nearly this well, even under ideal circumstances. (On top of that, it looks like a lot of OEMs are using single-channel DDR, and sometimes not even at a high frequency, on their Ryzen APU systems, which
sing_electric - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
*REALLY kills performance.only1jv - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Will there be a review of the DeskMini GTX 1080? I know this article mentions the GTX1060 model but why not the GTX1080?Now I'm really curious to know how the ASRock GTX1080 would stack up against the Zotac ZBOX EN1080K
darkos - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
why are there no flight simulation tests included? eg: prepar3d or fsx or x-plane ?s3cur3 - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
If an X-Plane benchmark is something the Anandtech editorial team would be interested in, you can contact me via the email in my profile. The numbers might be more useful after our transition to Vulkan, though.Ian Cutress - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Our website accounts don't have profiles - can you ping ian@anandtech.com. I'd like to see what we can do.bernstein - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
interesting product! finally a performance competitive SoC gaming (or 3d work) rig from intel!! just imagine the possibilities if they used coffee lake + vega 64!however the a price/performance ratio on gpu limited tasks :
- compared to a Shuttle XPC Gaming Cube is abysmal
- compared to a Skull Canyon NUC is phenomenal
so while expensive, it's certainly less overpriced than previous intel gaming NUC offerings...
kmmatney - Monday, May 14, 2018 - link
Looks like similar performance to a GTX 1050? or 1050 Ti? Would have been nice to include one of those cards.Yojimbo - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The difference between the 1050 Ti and the 1060 is quite large. This Intel chip with AMD graphics has a performance between them, but closer to the 1060 than a 1050 Ti, on average. Of course one would have to look closely at one's use case to decide whether it will run closer to a 1060 or to a 1050 Ti.