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: Civilization 6
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civilization series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer underflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but I have played every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, and it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
For this benchmark, we are using the following settings:
- 480p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
For automation, Firaxis supports the in-game automated benchmark from the command line, and output a results file with frame times. We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages and percentiles.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
 |
| 95th Percentile |  |
 |
 |
 |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
339 Comments
View All Comments
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?