AMD Zen 3 Ryzen Deep Dive Review: 5950X, 5900X, 5800X and 5600X Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on November 5, 2020 9:01 AM ESTGaming Tests: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| 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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Threska - Monday, November 16, 2020 - link
Depends upon advantage.https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/11/16/nvidia-l...
FreckledTrout - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
AMD finally has an Intel beater on its hands at least until Rocket Lake arrives. Having actual competition is going to be great computing. Nice review.duploxxx - Saturday, November 7, 2020 - link
nothing confirmed on Rocket Lake...fishy results with a so-called avg turbo ghz which actually shows it was doing 5ghz.
a total unknown release date, expected at the end of Q1 2021 on a dead platform with some kind of pcie-4 . yeah really looking forward.
Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
They'd have to get north of 5.3Ghz consistently to beat AMD.I just don't think they can, which would make the product pretty hilarious - big die, lots of heat, no performance crown.
hbsource - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Very impressive. I think I'm good with my 3950X until the next socket but the single thread uplift is very tempting.FireSnake - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
@Ian:"With AMD taking the performance crown in almost area it’s competing in"
Should this be:
"With AMD taking the performance crown in almost every area it’s competing in" ... missing every?
charlesg - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Now to just find the 5950 in stock at NewEgg!faizoff - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Quick question on encoding with Handbrake, the 4k encoding and even the others for that matter, what preset are they run? like fast, medium, slow? and what RF count are the encodes set to? Sorry if I missed those, don't see them at a glance. Amazing review as always. Best tech deep dive for me, I love to read the architectural breakdown.GeoffreyA - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
I think AT is using Handbrake's presets: (a) Discord Nitro 480p30, (b) Vimeo YouTube 720p30, and (c) HEVC 2160p60. I went through them now and here are the settings:A) Medium, CRF = 21
B) Medium, CRF = 22
C) Slow, CRF = 24
If you were looking for the reference frames, they are 3, 1, and 4. And there's a possibility Anandtech might have altered the presets.
DigitalFreak - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Does Purch require you to use at least one bad pun in every article?