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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johngardner58 - Monday, February 24, 2020 - link
Again it depends on the need. If you need speed, there is no alternative. You can't get it by just running blades because not everything can be broken apart into independent parallel processes. Our company once ran an analysis that took a very long time. When time is money this is the only thing that will fill the bill for certain workloads. Having shared high speed resources (memory and cache) make the difference. That is why 255 Raspberry PIs clustered will not outperform most home desktops unless they are doing highly independent parallel processes. Actually the MIPS per watt on such a processor is probably lower than having individual processors because of the combined inefficiencies of duplicate support circuitry.SanX - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Every second home has few running space heaters 1500W at winter timejohngardner58 - Monday, February 24, 2020 - link
Server side: depends on workload, usually yes a bladed or multiprocessor setup is usually better for massively parallel (independent) tasks, but cores can talk to each other much much much faster than blades, as they share caches, memory. So for less parallel work loads (single process multiple threads: e.g. rendering, numerics & analytics) this can provide far more performance and reduced costs. Probably the best example of the need for core count is GPU based processing. Intel also had specialized high core count XEON based accelerator cards with 96 cores at one point. There is a need even if limited.Samus - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
The problem is in the vast majority of the applications an $1800 CPU from AMD running on a $300 motherboard (that's an overall platform savings of $2400!) the AMD CPU either matches or beats the Intel Xeon. You have to cherry-pick the benchmarks Intel leads in, and yes, it leads by a healthy margin, but they basically come down to 7-zip, random rendering tasks, and Corona.Disaster strikes when you consider there is ZERO headroom for overclocking the Intel Xeon, where the AMD Threadripper has some headroom to probably narrow the gap on these few and far between defeats.
I love Intel but wow what the hell has been going on over there lately...
Jimbo2K7 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Baby's on fire? Better throw her in the water!Love the Eno reference!
repoman27 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Nah, I figure Ian for more of a Die Antwoord fan. Intel’s gone zef style to compete with AMD’s Zen style.Ian Cutress - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
^ repoman gets it. I actually listen mostly to melodic/death metal and industrial. Something fast paced to help overclock my brainWasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
My manIGTrading - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Was testing done with mediation regarding the specific windows BUG that affects AMD's CPUs with more than 16 cores? Or was it done with no attempt to ensure normal processing conditions for ThreadRipper, despite the known bug?eva02langley - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Insomnium, Kalmah, Hypocrisy, Dark Tranquility, Ne Obliviscaris...By the way, Saor and Rotting Christ are releasing their albums in two weeks.
You might want to check out Carpenter Brut - Leether Teeths and Rivers of Nihil - Where Owls Know My Name.