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
Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
IO die is the same between all of them - they probably just haven't churned enough chiplets out yet. Those top-end chips probably need a high bin to reach their intended clocks and power levels, too.lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
That seems like a mistake then -- should've released a 5890 and 5940 with lower clocks. At some point professionals are buying for IPC, thread count, and base clock speed.Qasar - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
how is that a mistake ? if no need to change the IO die yet, why change anything ?Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
On launch? Not really.If they're still unavailable a month or two from now, I'll be greatly disappointed.
Machinus - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Looks like a great set of chips for anyone who gets one mailed to them directly from AMD.Good luck buying one in a store.
danbob999 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
480p Low quality gaming benchmarks? Really? Someone really play Civ6 with those settings?What's the point? Who cares if CPU X has 454 fps while Y only does 322?
Hxx - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
those are unrealistic scenarios just to showcase the IPC gains over prev gen and competition. But yeah normally you would pick the resolution you are playing at and go from there. In this case at 1080p / 1440p it trades blows with Intel in most titles.silverblue - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
I'm not sure why the test revolves around frame rate, and not turn time. To use Gamers Nexus as a source, the 5950X completes a turn in 26.6 seconds, whereas the 10900K does it in 30.9 (29.3 OC to 5.2GHz), and the 3950X in 32.4. So, in this one test, the 10900K takes 16% longer, and the 3950X 22%.Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Yeah, I was a bit confused by not seeing turn times for Civ as that's the really big drag in late game scenarios.ExarKun333 - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link
Zen 3 feels a lot lot Core 2 ~ 14 years ago. Wow, very impressive.