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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peevee - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
You don't have real workstation tests except for Chromium compile, and even that is apparently broken (for example, no /Gm on the projects or something like that).Schmich - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Your ads are one of the worst of tech blogs. Distracting ads with moving items. Dynamic resizing of the slow loading header ads, so by the time you want to click on something you've clicked on something else. Autoplaying videos that follow you down as you read the article. No wonder people install adblock but strangely blogs call the readers a problem.peevee - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
Somebody reading anandtech who does not use adblocking?I am genuineley shocked.
And it's not a blog.
firestream - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Can someone test the those in-memory business application like Qlikview? It should be very interesting whether TR2 can replace the developer machine who are crunching large amount of dataset to build dashboard or analytic.crotach - Tuesday, October 30, 2018 - link
Damn, this i9-9900k is a beast! It even looks like good value for money when compared like this.SanX - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
What the problem with AMD AVX or test's AVX?GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
AMD's AVX units are limited due to the Zen architecture. Basically, they cut stuff down into 128-bit chunks but only certain modules can do certain things. AVX2 requires work over two instructions. And it can't do AVX-512 yet. This might well have been the appropriate decision - after all, wider units means more to go wrong, and more power. But it limits performance on AVX workloads.Henk Poley - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
I wonder when they'll include a few high performance cores for single core heavy tasks. Kinda ridiculous that an iPad Pro / iPhone XR can get +33 to +50% better performance on Speedometer 2.0Henk Poley - Saturday, November 10, 2018 - link
It could be cool to throw in a 4-core Intel Core i7-7740X, which appears to be fairly efficient in multicore performance. I wouldn't be surprised if it held up decently at the bottom spot, but using much less cores.