A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Red Dead Redemption 2
It’s great to have another Rockstar benchmark in the mix, and the launch of Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2) on the PC gives us a chance to do that. Building on the success of the original RDR, the second incarnation came to Steam in December 2019 having been released on consoles first. The PC version takes the open-world cowboy genre into the start of the modern age, with a wide array of impressive graphics and features that are eerily close to reality.
For RDR2, Rockstar kept the same benchmark philosophy as with Grand Theft Auto V, with the benchmark consisting of several cut scenes with different weather and lighting effects, with a final scene focusing on an on-rails environment, only this time with mugging a shop leading to a shootout on horseback before riding over a bridge into the great unknown. Luckily most of the command line options from GTA V are present here, and the game also supports resolution scaling. We have the following tests:
- 384p Minimum, 1440p Minimum, 8K Minimum, 1080p Max
For that 8K setting, I originally thought I had the settings file at 4K and 1.0x scaling, but it was actually set at 2.0x giving that 8K. For the sake of it, I decided to keep the 8K settings.
For our results, we run through each resolution and setting configuration for a minimum of 10 minutes, before averaging and parsing the frame time data.
| AnandTech | Low Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Low Qual |
High Res Low Qual |
Medium Res Max Qual |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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dotjaz - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
*servesSamus - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
That's not true. There were numerous requests from OEM's for Intel to make iGPU-enabled XEONs for the specific purpose of QuickSync, so there are indeed various applications other than ML where an iGPU in a server environment is desirable.erikvanvelzen - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
Ever since the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition I've wondered why intel does not permanently offer a top product with a large L3 or L4 cache.lemmemakethis - Thursday, December 3, 2020 - link
Great blog post for better understanding <a href="https://farmslik.com/sales/">Buy rams near me </a>plonk420 - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
been waiting for this to happen ...since the Fury/Fury X. would gladly pay the $230ish they want for a 6 core Zen 2 APU but even with "just" 4c8t + Vega 8 (but preferably 11) + HBM(2)ichaya - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
With the RDNA2 infinitycache announcement and the increase (~2x) in effective BW from it, and we know Zen has always done better with more memory BW, so it's just dead obvious now that an L4 cache on the I/O die would increase performance (especially in workloads like gaming) more than it's power cost.I really should have said waiting since Zen 2, since that was the I/O die was introduced, but I'll settle for eDRAM or SRAM L4 on the I/O die as that would be easier than a CCX with HBM2 as cache. Some HBM2 APUS would be nice though.
throAU - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
I think very soon for consumer focused parts, on package HBM won't necessarily be cache, but they'll be main memory. End users don't need massive amounts of RAM in end user devices, especially as more workload moves to cloud.8 GB of HBM would be enough for the majority of end user devices for some time to come and using only HBM instead of some multi-level caching architecture would be simpler - and much smaller.
Spunjji - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Really liking the level of detail from this new format! Fascinated to see how the Broadwell secret sauce has stood up to the test of time, too.Hopefully the new gaming CPU benchmarks will finally put most of the benchmark bitching to bed - for sure it goes to show (at quite some length) that the ranking under artificially CPU-limited scenarios doesn't really correspond to the ranking in a realistic scenario, where the CPU is one constraint amongst many.
Good work all-round 👍👍
lemurbutton - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
Anandtech: We're going to review a product from 2015 but we're not going to review the RTX 3080, RTX 3090, nor the RTX 3070.If I were management, I'd fire every one of the editors.
e36Jeff - Monday, November 2, 2020 - link
The guy that tests GPUs was affected by the Cali wildfires. Ian wouldn't be writing a GPU review regardless, he does CPUs.