The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 20, 2020 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Skylake
- 14nm
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
Gaming: 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.
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.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
AnandTech | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
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SKiT_R31 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Intel never left "the top". Top of 720p low graphics settings, by a single percentage margin. Totally worth 50% higher price.silencer12 - Saturday, May 23, 2020 - link
Give it more than 3 yearstracker1 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
AMD has already shifted their pricing quite a bit from launch in anticipation of this... is it clearly a better option, for most people... unless you literally only care about gaming, then a 10900K or 10700K might be an okay option at their respective price points and only if you're using at least an RTX 2080 Super. If you're going anything lower on GPU, then AMD is probably the better option all the way around (and you'll probably save a bit on your annual power bill as a result).VoraciousGorak - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Finally, a sane product stack from Intel with regards to naming versus core/thread count.Hifihedgehog - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Sane and thermal meltdown don't mix.ElvenLemming - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Unfortunate that their product stack finally makes sense now that the name sounds so stupid I get angry every time I read it.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
Whether it's "Eye-Nine Ten-Nine-Hundred-Kay" or "Eye-Nine Ten-Thousand-Nine-Hundred-Kay", it sounds equally daft.tipoo - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Chasing clocks and high power to counter AMD. Ah, Netburst, good times. Ish.WaltC - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I had forgotten Netburst...;) "The Intel CPU that accelerated the Internet"! Thanks for the laugh!trparky - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Yep, I agree.