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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TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
There is no x590 chipset coming. X570 is ryzen 5000s chipset.There's also this miracle fo technology, if you have a micro atx or full atx board, you can put in ADD IN CARDS. Amazing, right? So even if your board does not natively support 2.5G LAN you can add it for a low price, because 2.5G cards are relatively cheap.
TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link
the x570 aorus master and msi x570 unify also have 2.5G lan. And surely there will be newer models next year with newer features and names, gotta keep the model churn going!alhopper - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Ian and Andrei - 1,000 Thank Yous for this awesome article and you fine technical journalism. You guys did amazing work and we (the community) are fortunate to be the benefactors.Thanks again and keep up the Good Work (TM).
Rekaputra - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Wow this article it so comprehensive. Glad i always check anandtech for my reference in computing. I wonder how it stack againt threadripper on database or excel compute workload. I know these are desktop proc. But there is possibility use it for mini workstation for office stuff like accounting and development RDBMS as it is cheaper.SkyBill40 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
Once some availability comes back into play... my old and trusty FX 8350 is going to be retired. I've been waiting to rebuild for a long time now and the wait has clearly paid off regardless of how the is the end of the line for AM4 or well Ryzen 4 does next year. I could wait... but nah.jcromano - Friday, November 13, 2020 - link
I'm in a similar boat. I'm still running an i5-2500k from early 2011 (coming up on ten years, yikes), and I'll build a new rig, probably 5600X, when the processors become available. I fret a bit over whether I should wait for the next socket to arrive before taking the plunge, but given the infrequency with which I upgrade, I think it's likely that the next socket would also be obsolete by the time it mattered.evilpaul666 - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link
I'd love to see some PS3 emulation testing added.abufrejoval - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
Control flow integrity (or enforcement) seem to be in, and that was for me a major criterion for getting one (5800X scheduled to arrive tomorrow).But what about SEV or per-VM-encryption? From the hints I see this seems enabled in Intel's Tiger Lake and I guess the hardware would be there on all Zen 3 chiplets, but is AMD going to enable it for "consumer" platforms?
With 8 or more cores around, there is plenty of reasons why people would want to run a couple of VMs on pretty much anything, from a notebook to a home entertainment/control system, even a gaming rig. And some of those VMs we'd rather have secure from phishing and trojans, right?
Keeping this an EPIC-only or Pro-only feature would be a real mistake IMHO.
BTW ordered ECC DDR4-3200 to go with it, because this box will run 24x7 and pushes a Xeon E3-1276 v3 into cold backup.
lmcd - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
Starting to feel like the platform is way too constrained just for the sake of all 6 APUs AMD has released (all with mediocre graphics and most with mediocre CPUs, no less). I hope AMD bifuricates and comes up with an in-between platform that supports ~32-40 CPU PCIe lanes and drops APUs. If APUs can't be on-time with everything else there's so little point.29a - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link
"Firstly, because we need an AI benchmark, and a bad one is still better than not having one at all."Can't say I agree with that.