The AMD Threadripper 2 CPU Review: The 24-Core 2970WX and 12-Core 2920X Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 29, 2018 9:00 AM ESTGaming: 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 VI | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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The Hardcard - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
I am not clear on this: can I get a 4-active-die TR for rendering and then turn off the 2 parasite dies when they are a disadvantage. Say make the 2990X operate as a 2950X with the same performance and power?I am not clear if that is what the dynamic local mode is offering. I’d like to be able to do that, whether there is an official AMD path, or if the community finds another way.
BikeDude - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
<blockquote>Please note, if you plan to share out the Compression graph, please include the Decompression one. Otherwise you’re only presenting half a picture.</blockquote>Many moons ago I made a request to internal IT to adopt 7-zip so that I could save on bandwidth whenever I needed to pull a largish database (this was several years before GDPR obviously).
No go. It turned out that compressing the backups every night eats a lot of time. (decompressing these files was very fast regardless of setup) Well, actually they did use 7z.exe, but only as a normal zipper.
So sometimes the only relevant part of the equation is the compression time. (I do plan on purchasing AMD regardless for my next upgrade)
GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Use a threading-capable version of xz with the -T parameter so it uses all available threads and you'll find it flies on the default compression settings. It has a Windows version, too: https://tukaani.org/xz/GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Incidentally, you can probably run it something like xz < "input command" > output.xz, which should mean you don't actually have to write the dumps out, just the compressed version.PaoDeTech - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
I need 13 cores and 26 threads. Now what? I returned the 32 cores 64 threads one since it could not run FAR CRY at 60fps. But boy could it blend! Sarcasm aside, I write multi-threaded server software and unless I code an infinite loop by mistake (I'm NOT admitting to it) I can never max out 8 threads before hitting I/O limitations (on NVMe PCIe disk). But I can see how some number crunching parallel software would go to town with it.peevee - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
"I can never max out 8 threads before hitting I/O limitations (on NVMe PCIe disk)"Do you know these are IO limitations or do you assume this? Because lack of scaling after 8 threads does not mean IO limit at all. For example, if you write in Java/C#/Python/JS etc (heap-mandatory languages), or even use heap alloc/dealloc in critical thread sections in fast languages like C++, this is what you are going to get (heap mutex = no scalability). And this is just 1 of a thousand pitfalls of massive threading.
PaoDeTech - Thursday, November 1, 2018 - link
No locks, every client call gets its own thread (REST- IIS -WebAPI -.NET "stateless" server - Entity Framework - SQL Server with read committed snapshot isolation). Async all the way down. Under load I can see the disk active >50% and write speed maxes out at 7 MB/s (Toshiba NVMe PCIe 1TB SSD M2). All processes running on the same PC (i7 6700k - 32GB RAM): server, test clients, SQL server. Plenty of free ram.Of course performance optimization is in the details and I was referring to a specific write intensive test case. My point is that parallel scaling is not easy and may stop sooner than expected (for many reasons). On the other hand, I can always use faster single thread performance...
29a - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Please replace EgoMark (3DPM) with something else, anything else.danjw - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Are there any motherboards out there that support the security features of the Threadripper platform?SLVR - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
This review is a bit more useful: https://www.techspot.com/review/1737-amd-threadrip...