The Intel 9th Gen Review: Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 19, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Core 9th Gen
- Core-S
- i9-9900K
- i7-9700K
- i5-9600K
Gaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
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.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Civilization 6 | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Continuing the theme we’ve seen thus far, Civilization 6 is another game where the 9900K does provide some benefits, but not under all circumstances. The game is not particularly GPU-intensive to begin with, so at just 4K Ultra we’re still not entirely GPU limited; but past a Ryzen 7 2700X or so, all the CPUs start running together. We have to drop to 1080p Ultra to really pull the CPUs off of the dogpile, at which point the 9900K comes out in the lead.
This is another game that doesn’t seem to care about core counts so much as it does frequencies. So the 9900K has the strongest position here, while the 9700K brings up second place. But neither are very far from the 8700K, with Intel’s latest coming in at just 12% faster than their former flagship even at these CPU benchmarking sympathetic settings.
Curiously we also see the 9900K fall behind the 9700K at 4K and higher. The difference is easily close enough to be noise, but it might be a very slight impact of the lower-tier chips not having to share their cores with hyper-threading.
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The Original Ralph - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
sorry, B&H's availability date should be JAN 1, 2100eastcoast_pete - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
JAN 1, 2100? Intel's manufacturing problems must be at lot more serious than we knew (:I wonder if the 9900K will be supported by "Windows 21" when they finally ship?
cubebomb - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
you guys need to stop posting 1080p benchmarks for games already. come on now.gammaray - Sunday, October 21, 2018 - link
I agree, 1440p and higher, especially with the top CPUsmapesdhs - Sunday, October 21, 2018 - link
They would of course respond that they have to show 1080p in order to reveal CPU differences, even if the frame rates are so high that most people wouldn't care anyway. I suppose those who do game at 1080p on high refresh monitors would say they care about the data, but then the foundation of the RTX launch is a new pressure to move away from high refresh rates, something the aforementioned group of gamers physically cannot do.piroroadkill - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
They need to show a meaningful difference between CPUs. setting a higher resolution makes the tests worthless, as you'll just be GPU bottlenecked.eva02langley - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
They are important since they bring in perspective CPU bottleneck, however it is widely overpreached.1080p, 1440p and 2160p at max settings... enough said. Without multiple resolutions benchmarks, it is impossible to get a clear picture of the real performances to expect from a potential system.
However, basically, a value rating system is now MANDATORY. It doesn't make any sense that the 9900k received 90% + score on Toms and WCCF. They offer abysmal value for gamers, so it is not "The Best Gaming CPU", however it is the "strongest"
DominionSeraph - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
It's $110 over the i7. If you're looking at a $2500 i7 rig, going to $2610 with an i9 is a 4% increase in price. Looks to me like it generally wins by over 4%. That's a really good value for a content creator since it stomps the i7 by over 20%.Chestertonian - Wednesday, February 27, 2019 - link
No kidding. Why are there barely any 1440p benchmarks, but there are tons of 8k benchmarks? I don't get it.avatar-ds - Sunday, October 21, 2018 - link
Something's fishy with the 8086k consistently underperforming the 8700k in many (most?) gaming tests by more than a margin of error where differences are significant enough. Undermines credibility of the whole thing.