The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Final Fantasy XV
Upon arriving to PC earlier this, Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition was given a graphical overhaul as it was ported over from console, fruits of their successful partnership with NVIDIA, with hardly any hint of the troubles during Final Fantasy XV's original production and development.
In preparation for the launch, Square Enix opted to release a standalone benchmark that they have since updated. Using the Final Fantasy XV standalone benchmark gives us a lengthy standardized sequence to record, although it should be noted that its heavy use of NVIDIA technology means that the Maximum setting has problems - it renders items off screen. To get around this, we use the standard preset which does not have these issues.
Square Enix has patched the benchmark with custom graphics settings and bugfixes to be much more accurate in profiling in-game performance and graphical options. For our testing, we run the standard benchmark with a FRAPs overlay, taking a 6 minute recording of the test.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Final Fantasy XV | JRPG | Mar 2018 |
DX11 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
4K Standard |
8K Standard |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Final Fantasy XV | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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FMinus - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Not really, 3D rednering is done on specialized render farms, the modeling work, key framing etc. can be done on any decent modern mainstream CPU, and especially well on any modern HEDT chip, for prototyping and preview, once satisfied, send it out to render properly.eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
The only scenario where this or similar Xeons do outperform the AMD lineup is if (!) the key application (s) in question make good use of AVX512. In those situations, Intel is still way ahead. In all others, a similar or lower priced Threadripper will give more bang for the buck.Tango - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
There are scenarios in which this is perfect, and in fact my research department is looking into acquiring two of them. Our algorithms include both highly parallelized instructions and completely non parallelizable ones where clock speed dominates. We estimate models that take a whole weekend to spot out a result, and the alternative is paying top money for supercomputer time.At $3000 it is a steal. The problem is half Wall Street will be sending orders to get one, since the use case is similar for high frequency trading applications.
MattZN - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I expect all the review sites will redo their 2990WX benchmarks once Microsoft is able to fix the scheduler. The question is really... how long will it take Microsoft to fix their scheduler? That said, nobody should be expecting massive improvements. Some of the applications will improve a ton, but not all of them. It will be more like a right-sizing closer to expected results and less like hitting the ball out of the park.-Matt
BGADK - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Little professional software exists for Linux, so these machines WILL run windows for most parts.cmcl - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Agree that there is more professional software for Windows, but in visual effects (where I work), 90% of our workstations (and all render) runs on Linux (24-core workstations, with P6000s), running Nuke, Maya etc. Apart from the gaming benchmarks (and who would buy one of these for gaming), a lot of the tests could be done in Linux as that software runs on LinuxIcehawk - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Workstations aside, these mega-core beasts are run as VM hosts on bare metal. I don't have a single server here that just runs an OS & app suite, it's not 2000 anymore everything is virtualized as much as possible.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Holy shit. AMD absolutely bent intel over on this one. The price for performance ratio is overwhelming in AMD ls favor! Intel would have released this for 8k if the 2990wx wasnt so competitive!WOW!
GreenReaper - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
They probably wouldn't have released it at all. As noted, most of these could easily be server cores on which they could make plenty more money. This appears to be largely a PR effort.jcc5169 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Who in the world would buy this over-priced piece-of-crap?