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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MisterAnon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
PNC is not right at all, he's completely wrong. Unless your job requires you to walk around and type at the same time using a laptop is a net loss of producitivity for zero gain. At a professional workplace anyone who thinks that way would definitely be fired. If you're going to be in the same room for 8 hours a day doing real work, it makes sense to have a desktop with dual monitors. You will be faster, more efficient, more productive, and more comfortable. Powerful desktops are more useful today than ever before due to the complexity of modern demands.TheinsanegamerN - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
What is your source for gamers being the primary consumers of HDET?imaheadcase - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Well of course for programming its ok. That is like saying you moved from a desktop to a phone for typing. It requires nothing to type hardly for power. lol That pretty much as always been the case.bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I think you are implying programming is not a CPU intensive task? Certainly it can be low intensity for small projects, but trust me it can also use as much CPU as you can possibly throw at it. When you have a project that requires compiling thousands or tens of thousands of files to build it ... the workload scales fairly linearly with the number of cores, up to some fuzzy limit mostly set by memory bandwidth.twtech - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
I also work in software development (games), and my experience has been completely the opposite. I've actually only known one programmer who preferred to work on a laptop - he bought a really high-end Clevo DTR and brought it in to work.I do have a laptop at my desk - I brought in a Surface Book 2 - but I mostly just use it for taking notes. I don't code on it.
Unless you're going to be moving around all the time, I don't know why you'd prefer to look at one small screen and type on a sub-par laptop keyboard if there's the choice of something better readily available. And two 27" screens is pretty much the minimum baseline - I have 3x 30" here at home.
:And then of course there's the CPU - if you're working on a really small codebase, it might not matter. But if it's a big codebase, with C++, you want to have a lot of cores to be able to distribute the compiling load. That's why I'm really interested in the forthcoming W3175x - high clocks plus 28 cores on a monolithic chip sounds like a winning combination for code compiling. High end for a laptop is what, 6 cores now?
Laibalion - Saturday, November 17, 2018 - link
What utter nonsense. I'be been working on large and complex c++ codebases (2M+ LOC for a single product) for over a decade, and compute power is an absolute necessity to work efficiently. Compile times such beast scales linearly (if done properly), so no one wants a shit mobile cpu for their workstation.HStewart - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
Mobile has been this way for decade - I got a new job working at home and everyone is on laptops - todays laptop are as powerful as most desks - work has quad core notebook and this is my 2nd notebook and first one was from nine years ago. Desktops were not used in my previous job. Notebook mean you can be mobile - for me that is when I go to home office which is not often - but also bring notebook to meeting and such.I am development C++ and .net primary.
Desktop are literary dinosaurs now becoming part of history.
bji - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
You are not working on big enough projects. For your projects, a laptop may be sufficient; but for larger projects, there is certainly a wide chasm of difference between the capabilities of a laptop and those of a workstation class developer system.MisterAnon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
Today's laptops are not as powerful as desktops. They use slow mobile processors, and overheat easily due to thermals. If you're working from home you're still sitting in a chair all day, meaning you don't need a laptop. If your company fired you and hired someone who uses a desktop with dual monitors, they would get significantly more work done for them per dollar.Atari2600 - Tuesday, November 13, 2018 - link
I wouldn't call them very "professional" when they are sacrificing 50+% productivity for mobility.Anyone serious about work in a serious work environment* has a workstation/desktop and at least 2 of UHD/4k monitors. Anything else is just kidding yourself thinking you are productive.