The Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Refresh Until it Hertz
by Ian Cutress on November 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. 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, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Grand Theft Auto V | Open World | Apr 2015 |
DX11 | 720p Low |
1080p High |
1440p Very High |
4K Ultra |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Game | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
143 Comments
View All Comments
at8750 - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Hi, Ian.Did Intel officially announce Skylake-X Refresh be manufactured on 14++ node?
But 9980XE Stepping is the same as 7980XE.
Stepping is 4, there is no change.
SanX - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Sometimes the advantage of these processors with AVX512 versus usual desktop processors with AVX2 is crazy. The 3D particle tests fly like 500 mph cars. Which other tasks besides 3D particle movement also benefit from AVX512?How about linear algebra? Does Intel MKL which seems now support these extensions demonstrate similar speedups with AVX512 on solutions Ax=B, say, with the usual dense matrices?
TitovVN1974 - Friday, November 16, 2018 - link
Pray look up linpack results.SonicAndSmoke - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
@Ian: What's with that paragraph about the Mesh clocks on page 1? Mesh clock is 2.4 GHz stock on SKX, and there is no mesh turbo at all. You can check for yourself with AIDA64 or HwInfo. So does SKX-R have the same 2.4 GHz clock, or higher?Tamerlin - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Thorough review as always.I'd like to request that you consider adding some DaVinci Resolve tests to your suite, as it would be helpful for professional film post production professionals. There is a free license which has enough capability for professional work, and there is free raw footage available from Black Magic's web site and 8K raw footage available from Red's.
Thanks :)
askmedov - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Intel is playing with fire by doing incremental upgrades over and over again. Look no further than Apple's new iPads - their chips are better than what Intel has to offer in terms of price-power-efficiency. Apple is going to ditch Intel's processors very soon for most of its Mac lineup.bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Microsoft Windows is known to suck hard when it comes to performance on NUMA architectures and particularly the TR2 processors. See Phoronix for analysis.Why does Anandtech continue to post Windows-only benchmarks? They are fairly useless; they tell more about the limitations of Microsoft Windows than they do the processors themselves.
Of course, if you're a poor sap stuck running Windows for any task that requires these processors, I guess you care, but you really should be pushing your operating system vendor to use some of their billions of dollars to hire OS developers who know what they are doing.
I just bought a TR2 1950X for my software development workstation (Linux based) and I am fairly confident that for my work loads, it will kick the crap out of these Intel processors. I wouldn't know for sure though because I tend to read Anandtech fairly exclusively for hardware reports, dipping into sites like Phoronix only when necessary to get accurate details for edge cases like the TR2.
It sure would be nice if my site of choice (Anandtech) would start posting relevant results from operating systems designed to take advantage of these high power processors instead of more Windows garbage ... especially Windows gaming benchmarks, as if those are even remotely relevant to this CPU segment!
bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Erp I meant 2950X, sorry typo there.Shaky156 - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
I have to agree 110%, gaming benchmarks are more gpu/ipc related more than a multicore cpu benchmark.Somehow seems anandtech could be biased
eva02langley - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Totally agree, we have come to a time that benchmarks are not even accurately evaluating the product anymore. The big question is how can we depict an accurate picture? Especially if the reviewer is not choosing the right ones properly for real comparison.Well, seeing disparity from Phoronix is raising major concern to me.