The AMD Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X CPU Review
by Ian Cutress on February 11, 2019 11:45 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 |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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At 1080p and 4K, the extra threads on the 2500X help a lot here.
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Le Québécois - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
Ian, any reason why more often than not, you seem to "skip" 1440 in your benchmarks? It's only present for a few games.Considering the GTX 1080, your best card, is always the bottleneck at 4K, as your numbers show, wouldn't it make more sense to focus more on 1440 instead?
Especially considering it's the "best" resolution on the market if you are looking for a high pixel density yet still want to run your games at a playable levels of fps.
Ian Cutress - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
Some benchmarks are run at 1440p. Some go up to 8K. It's a mix. There's what, 10 games there? Not all of them have to conform to the same testing settings.Le Québécois - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Sorry for the confusion. I can clearly see we've got very different settings in that mix. I guess a more direct question would be: why do it this way and not with a more standardized series of test?A followup question would also be, why 8K? You are already GPU limited at 4K so your 8K result are not going to give any relevant information about those CPUs.
Sorry, I don't mean to criticized, I simply wish to understand your thought process.
MrSpadge - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
What exactly do you want to see there that you can't see at 1080p? Differences between CPUs are going to be muddied due to approaching the GPU limit, and that's it.Le Québécois - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Well, at 1080, you can definitely see the difference between them, and exactly like you said, at 4K, it's all the same because of the GPU limitations. 1440 seems more relevant than 4K considering this. This is after all, a CPU review and most of the 4K results could be summed up by "they all perform within a few %".neblogai - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
End of page 19: R5 2600 is really 65W TDP, not 95W.Ian Cutress - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
Doh, a typo in all my graphs too. Should be updated.imaheadcase - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
Im on phone on AT and truly see how terrible ads are now. AT straight up letting scam ads now being served because desperate for revenue. 😂PeachNCream - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link
Is there a point in even mentioning that give how little control they now have over advertising? Just fire up the ad blocker or visit another site and let the new owners figure it out the hard way.StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link
Anandtech had Maleware/Viruses infect it's userbase years ago via crappy adverts.That was the moment I got Ad-Block. And that is the moment where I will never turn it off again.