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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Ian Cutress - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
EPYC 7601 is 2.2 GHz base, 3.2 GHz Turbo, at 180W, fighting against 4.2+ GHz Turbo parts at 250W. Also the memory we have to use is server ECC memory, which has worse latencies than consumer memory. I've got a few EPYC chips in, and will be testing them in due course.mapesdhs - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Does the server memory for EPYC run at lower clocks aswell?GreenReaper - Wednesday, October 31, 2018 - link
ECC RAM typically runs slower, yes. It's correctness that you're looking for first and foremost, and high speeds are harder to guarantee against glitches, particularly if you're trying to calculate or transfer or compare parity at the same time.iwod - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Waiting for Zen2Boxie - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
only Zen2? Psshh - it was announced ages ago... /me is waiting ofr Zen5 :Pwolfemane - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
*nods in agreement* me to, I hear good things about Zen5. Going to be epyc!5080 - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Why are there so many game tests with Threadripper? It should be clear by now that this CPU is not for gamers. I would rather see more tests with other professional software such as Autoform, Catia and other demanding apps.DanNeely - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
The CPU Suite is a standard set of tests for all chips Ian tests from a lowly atom, all the way up to top end Xeon/Epyc chips; not something bespoke for each article which would limit the ability to compare results from one to the next. The limited number of "pro level" applications tested is addressed in the article at the bottom of page 4."A side note on software packages: we have had requests for tests on software such as ANSYS, or other professional grade software. The downside of testing this software is licensing and scale. Most of these companies do not particularly care about us running tests, and state it’s not part of their goals. Others, like Agisoft, are more than willing to help. If you are involved in these software packages, the best way to see us benchmark them is to reach out. We have special versions of software for some of our tests, and if we can get something that works, and relevant to the audience, then we shouldn’t have too much difficulty adding it to the suite."
TL;DR: The vendors of the software aren't interested in helping people use their stuff for benchmarks.
Ninhalem - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
ANSYS is terrible from a licensing standpoint even though their software is very nice for FEA. COMSOL could be a much better alternative for high-end computational software. I have found the COMSOL representatives to be much more agreeable to product testing and the support lines are much better, both in responsiveness and content help.mapesdhs - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Indeed, ANSYS is expensive, and it's also rather unique in that it cares far more about memory capacity (and hence I expect bandwidth) than cores/frequency. Before x86 found its legs, an SGI/ANSYS user told me his ideal machine would be one good CPU and 1TB RAM, and that was almost 20 years ago.