The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 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.
| 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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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).
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| GTA V | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Icehawk - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Yup. At the desktop level we have things like Adobe for $1k/seat/yr.Our big iron costs an order of magnitude more than these machines (recent orders were $150k ea and were mid-spec HP boxes). In the end most of the costs of a big server are memory and storage (SSDs). The high heat/energy consumption of this setup would be a concern, especially if in a colo.
jardows2 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
What are you rambling on about? It's a solid performing product, at a much reduced price than Intel's normal markup. I don't get where you come off thinking this is a fanboy post, and you totally missed my point - why is it limited to so few pieces? In Intel's lineup, it's a winner, and there are plenty of people in workstation markets who will only buy systems with Intel CPUs. So for Intel to make a good performing product, at a much lower than normal for Intel price, but only make a couple thousand of them? What's going on over there?edzieba - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Because this is a cherry-picked part from a low-run die production. Intel don't make many XCC dies, and only a handful will be able to tolerate the high voltages and frequencies of this part across all 28 cores. It's also not going to be a big earner at $3000, that may break even on production but probably a loss overall when you take R&D into account.mapesdhs - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
A movie company I know buys systems in such bulk, a CPU/system like this wouldn't even show up on their radar. They prefer systems they can buy lots of, for multiple sites with a common setup.People are arguing here about A vs. B, about the CPU cost, but as many have pointed out it's often the sw cost and availability which determine what a company will purchase. As for workstation use, especially the prosumer market, that has its own set of issues, especially whether a particular app is written well enough to exploit so many cores. Blender is, but Premiere isn't.
FMinus - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Or you can get two TR 2970W system and make them work in tandem for what I would think would be almost half the price at this point, considering you can buy this Intel gem only pre-built for probably well bloated prices.SanX - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Intel are killing good at particle movement -- 4x faster then TR2. Till AMD makes AVX512 they are still dead for scienceET - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I find it amazing how application dependent performance is. Whether a product is a good buy depends so much on precisely what you're going to do with it, down to the application level.Still, on the whole, it looks like Intel has little to offer over AMD's much cheaper Threadripper platform.
BigMamaInHouse - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I think soon we gonna see "Leaks" about new TR64 cores, this "5GHZ 28C" stunt made AMD to release 2990WX instead just 24C 2970WX, now after the Fail attempt by Intel - We gonna see new leaks :-).FMinus - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
Considering AMD was attending the same trade show, where Intel announced this 28 core chip and AMD a day later announced the new TR lineup, I'd say AMD planned to release the 2990WX regardless of what Intel had.mapesdhs - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
Yes, but the tinfoil hat industry is strong. :D