The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Ashes: Classic | RTS | Mar 2016 |
DX12 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
1440p Standard |
4K Standard |
|
Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
[game list table]
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Ashes: Classic | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Yorgos - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I don't know what's more delusional, Intel selling a 500Watt CPUor fanboys thinking that this product will sell well at $3000.
Listen buddy, most sales from these systems come from Dell, HP and/or Lenovo workstations.
Nobody is going to bother messing with a cpu that's a fire hazard, gives you the same PCI-e lanes as a $300 CPU and you are obliged, as Dell/HP/Lenovo, to buy special motherboards from asus or another manufacturer.
Finally, the product placement here from Purch media targets Gamers, plus intel targets gamers.
This is just a shelf product, just like 8700k and 9900k to fight for the first position in some benchmarks, against zen, due to the unfortunate circumstances of zen being that good.
This product takes binned cpus away from much higher priced Xeons. They are not going to make great numbers available, by default, even if they could supply the market.
eddman - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
"delusional", "fanboys", "Listen buddy", "fire hazard"You don't have to get so emotional to make a point.
Yorgos - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I like my comments to be vivid.I don't write NPC comments.
Arbie - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Then you should move to somewhere like Wccftech, where you won't even have to rationalize picking fights and being gratuitously rude. People like you ruin the tone of a quality forum.eddman - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Being vulgar and crass isn't the same as being "vivid". If you cannot reply without resorting to name calling, then this not the place for you.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
What part of his comment insulted you, snowflake?eddman - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I didn't say he's not right.None. The point is this is a tech site. There is no need for such remarks.
"Snowflake"
This is what I'm talking about. Randomly calling people names with no reason. You don't even know me.
PeachNCream - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
I've run a lot of paper and pencil RPGs over the years and I'm disappointed to say that a number of my cookie cutter NPCs had more personality than some of the player characters, but I'm one of those story first GM types.WasHopingForAnHonestReview - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Buzzwords or not the man is right.BGADK - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
You have no idea what professional software costs. In the end my clients dont care if the PC costs 5000USD, 7000 USD or 12000USD.The difference disapear when you add the software costs and my fee.