Gaming: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)

Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.

The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.

AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List
Game Genre Release Date API IGP Low Med High
Strange Brigade* FPS Aug
2018
DX12
Vulkan
720p
Low
1080p
Medium
1440p
High
4K
Ultra
*Strange Brigade is run in DX12 and Vulkan modes

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

AnandTech IGP Low Medium High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

AnandTech IGP Low Medium High
Average FPS
95th Percentile

For Strange Brigade, only gaming at 720p shows significant differences between CPUs.

Gaming: Ashes Classic (DX12) Gaming: Grand Theft Auto V
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  • Daeros - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    Your Intel bias is showing again, Ian. You've pitted a very nice selection of midrange processors from AMD against some very nice, almost double the price chips from Intel. If you're going to include the i5-8400 and i5-8600k, why not the R7 2600x or 2700? They're price-point competitors. But then, Intel wouldn't be at the top of the charts in almost any of the tests, would they?
  • Ian Cutress - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    All the data is in Bench for those parts. I mention repeatedly (as I did in our buyer's guide) that Intel doesn't really have anything competitive from 8th/9th Gen in the $120-$200 range. I put some parts in that are at least offer thread parity, as explained on page one of this review, if you read that far. But then again, Intel's 8th gen chips are priced well above the usual price right now.

    Subsequently, your data bias is showing. It's not about being at the absolute top of the graph. It never has. It's about competing with what's around you and some context either side from major competitors. If you want to compare higher priced parts against higher priced parts, then there's either a benchmark database to look at, or the corresponding reviews for those chips.

    All quite apart from which, most of my analysis is comparing the AMD parts to other AMD parts because they're not sold at retail and where they would fit in if they did. That's one of the major points of this review.
  • c4v3man - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    Is Anandtech trying to acquire an Intel i3-8100 processor for testing? This would seem to be a fairly natural comparison point to these processors at it's $117 customer pricing level. Granted you can approximate the results off the i3-8350K, and assume it's roughly 10% slower, but having actual numbers would be preferred over manual re-calculations.
  • HStewart - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    What about i5-8400T - according to ARC it price at $179 which will be in price range you stated

    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/p...

    Big difference is that it does not have Hyperthreading, been 6 cores without hyperthreading it could be serious competitor to Ryzen 5 2500X - it does have lesser max frequency than normal 8400
  • Korguz - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link

    HStewart...
    that price.. could be an intel suggested price, or the tray price....
  • HStewart - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link

    It is the price on Amazon, and selling out

    https://www.amazon.com/Intel-CM8068403358913-Core-...
  • MattMe - Tuesday, February 12, 2019 - link

    @Ian - Whilst not quite as militant as some other forum users, I do agree that the testing and comparisons you have used here are not the most appropriate or useful. A similarly priced Intel CPU like the i3 would demonstrate competitive value in the marketplace. If we are including the more expensive Intel CPUs (because of their similar thread count, which I understand) then the graphs should have the equivalently priced AMD alternatives, again to help consumers understand the value proposition from both sides.

    Regarding the games/GPU options, I feel the testing you have carried out is useful, and although it's unlikely these CPUs would be paired with such a high-end GPU, we are at least ruling out the GPU being the limiting factor until reaching 4k, where your graphs demonstrate that the CPU is no longer the bottleneck. Without doubling the number of tests and data presented in the articles, I feel you've presented the most useful benchmarks and information. You'll never please everyone, I suppose.

    Overall I think this is another fantastic write-up and appreciate the effort you put into the research and testing, but I can understand some people's frustrations when it comes to the comparisons you have chosen to demonstrate.
  • mikato - Thursday, April 4, 2019 - link

    Well said
    "If we are including the more expensive Intel CPUs (because of their similar thread count, which I understand) then the graphs should have the equivalently priced AMD alternatives, again to help consumers understand the value proposition from both sides."
  • Phynaz - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    Typical AMD - Hot and Slow
  • formulaLS - Monday, February 11, 2019 - link

    Typical Phynaz, quit the forums and said he won't be coming back and ended up flat out lying about it. Grow up dude.

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