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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nexuspie - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
You're so ghetto you're using a 2500k from 2011? Stop posting and get a job so you can afford an upgrade. I guess it proves that Intel makes good chips though if you can wait this long to upgrade.LordanSS - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Still rocking a 3770k. Not going to pay "Intel price" for 4-cores and just 20% more IPC than I have.Zen2, that'll be my swap.
Spunjji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I seriously don't understand people who are so insecure about their choices that they need to mock random people on the internet for not overspending on their computer equipment. If your use case enables you to spend on the absolute best way past the point of diminishing returns, that's great for you! Be happy and maybe lay off the comment sections..?Kilnk - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
No... all it really means is that for the first time in the history of computing, software demands have allowed computing power to reach the level of "good enough" for a lot of users. Also things are a lot more GPU dependant than they used to be. CPUs are less relevant.duploxxx - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
It is quite obvious. From a general performance/price/power perspective the TR2 2950x is the one to get. Forget all the uber expensive Intel junk.qap - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I guess it depends on i9-9820X. And I have a feeling it would be similar story to 2990WX vs i9-9980XE - AMD scoring in some benchmarks while intel keeping victory in other.Those who matter (actual buyers) will look at bench that matters to them while fans would be squealing that this or that benchmark is more important and therefore their favorite CPU is the best.
eva02langley - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I would honestly get an EPYC platform over the TR 32 cores. However, at this point, you have a really particular workload that requires such capabilities.It all depends on your needs, but true, Intel is not competitive at their price tags.
nexuspie - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
These benchmarks show that the 9980's 18 cores often BEAT the 2990wx's 32 cores. AMD cores are garbage.Targon - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
In what world are AMD cores garbage when they are more than competitive enough to push Intel into releasing the first significant changes in six years? Zen2 cores are also here(with the new Epyc chips), and Ryzen 3rd generation will be launching within the next five months or so, which WILL have a higher IPC than Intel at that point.twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
The upgrade AMD really needs at this point is a software one - from Microsoft. The 2990WX performs pretty well when using Linux, but it struggles with most workloads in Windows. I hope that Zen 2's chiplets will do a little better in terms of memory access.