A Broadwell Retrospective Review in 2020: Is eDRAM Still Worth It?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 2, 2020 11:00 AM ESTGaming Tests: Strange Brigade
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 as an on-rails experience through the game. For quality, the game 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. Strange Brigade supports Vulkan and DX12, and so we test on both.
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Ultra
The automation for Strange Brigade is one of the easiest in our suite – the settings and quality can be changed by pre-prepared .ini files, and the benchmark is called via the command line. The output includes all 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.