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 |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Game | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
It's indeed suprise to me that those new 24,32C AMD processors 2920,2970 are just worst in any therms than their 16C equivalents. In terms of perf/money perf/power just laughable.Linux changes a lot but who uses Linux and for what purpose?
I bet developers but what makes me really angry is that nobody even tries to use KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, VMware, VirtualBox as benchmarking tool for purpose of testing usage as small company server. In mine company lot of Remote Desktop sessions are connected to same server.
Someone would think - who needs good CPU? But it's only because dont used to solve real life problems and those problems are like importing big databases from obsolete programs, filtering, fixing and exporting to new ERP systems. This consumes lot of time to have fast CPU is crucial. Most of companies i know uses RDP server for that purpose and typical cheep portable laptops given to workers. To have AMD or Intel HDET tested in such purposes would be nice to see. Cause anyone can potencially have 32C anyone could benefit.. but rather than this kind test i used to see gaming.. gaming od HDET?! WTF
pandemonium - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
All of these "my work doesn't have any desktop users" comments crack me up. Congratulations. Your work is not the entire world of computing in a professional space, much less prosumer space. Get over yourselves.halcyon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
@Ian CutressYour tests and review text are always a pleasure to read, thank you for the professionalism.
Questions related to the test suite (I know, everybody always wants something):
1. You are missing an Excel Spreadsheet calculation (Finance still uses a lot of these and they can peg all cores near 100% and be incredibly CPU dependent). Would be nice to see some for example an Excel Monte Carlo simulation kn the suite (local data)
2. Alternatively an R (language) based test for heavy statistical computation. Finding a one that is representative of real world workloads and strikes a balance between single core IPC and many core parallelisation might take some work. But this is one area where laptops just can't muster it and CUDA/OpenCL acceleration isn't often available at all.
3. For Web / JS framework it is nice to see SpeedoMeter and WebXPRT3, but for some reason V8 Web Tooling Bench is not there (https://v8.github.io/web-tooling-benchmark/ ). The old Kraken/JetStream/Octane are nice for reference, but not very representative of real world anymore for some time now (hence why they are abandoned).
Again thank you for this monumental work, the amount of tests is already superb!
For graphing results it would be so helpful to get a comparative price/perf graphed results browser (pick your baseline CPU, pick workloads, cpus on graph as a func of price/perf). This would enable auick viewinf of the efficient frontier in terms of price/perf for each workload and see the base CPU as an anchor.
Yeah, yeah, I know.... Just throwing this in here 😀
KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
These benchmarks also show the 16 core TR 2950X beating the 18 core i9-9980XE in some cases.KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
My previous comment was a reply to nexuspie's observation that, "These benchmarks show that the 9980's 18 cores often BEAT the 2990wx's 32 cores."Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Witch should lead to conlcusion AMD Threadripper 2 is just bad offer except 2950.It's the one and only AMD CPU worh mentioning - witch means TR4 16C is dead end.
AMD offers overpriced CPUs on that platform that is for sure.
Overpriced because half of cores are choking being absolute useless.
If 32C and 4 channels is too much cores/channel imagine RYEN 3 16C on dual channel..
It will be big dissapointment for some people i bet.
Regardless of pricing Intel 9980 is just great.
Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Is that what you wanted to say?crotach - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
I have to say I'm a big fan of HEDT platforms, I built my last workstation in 2011 and it still serves me well 7 years later. But looking at this and the X299 offering I really don't see why anyone would bother.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Till intel changes the way it builds high core count cpu's they can't compete with AMD and it will be even worse next year when AMD made an already cheaper way to produce high core count cpu's even cheaper, to sick levels.Gasaraki88 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
I'm actually more interested in the i7-9800X vs. the i9-9900K. I want to see how the overclocking is compared to the i9-9900K before I just in to X299.