The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Civilization VI | IGP |
| Average FPS |  |
| 95th Percentile |  |
We had issues running Civilization beyond IGP, we're looking into exactly why.
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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?