Gaming 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
95th Percentile

All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.

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  • Qasar - Tuesday, November 10, 2020 - link

    simple. if intel/nvidia does it, its ok, and accepted. but if amd does it ? its a crime, and becomes important.
  • TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, November 12, 2020 - link

    The leectrical costs from running intel VS amd add up to literal cents per month. If you are that concerned....you shouldnt be buying $500 CPUs.

    Cost of ownership really only matters, similarly, on cheap low end cars. People buying $100K+ mercedes are not particularly concerned about the price of parts or fuel, if they were they wouldnt be buying a $100K car.
  • Threska - Monday, November 16, 2020 - link

    Funny thing my APC UPS keeps track of something like that for things plugged it. Only thing that demonstrates is that everything costs, even FUN.
  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    Only if you totally ignore performance per watt... You need a cooler capable of dissipating up to 250W to hit that performance, and even then, your characterisation here is garbage. Overall the 5800X is a superior product for the same price, and it's only just been released.

    Let the shitty, bitter takes continue!
  • Gigaplex - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    And when Intel held the performance crown, they priced their parts higher than the competition. This is to be expected. AMD only undercut on price because they couldn't compete on performance previously.
  • LithiumFirefly - Friday, November 6, 2020 - link

    They didn't just price their parts higher for nearly 25 years they just slapped $1,000 price tag on their top chip didn't matter what its performance was $1,000 that's what it was.
  • just4U - Thursday, November 5, 2020 - link

    the 5900X is nice at it's price point @ only 3-10 bucks more than the 10900K which appears to be what it's competing with.. and all the 10core parts really. The 5800X is in a odd position.. and I doubt it's going to be all that popular at that price point.
  • Spunjji - Sunday, November 8, 2020 - link

    5600 and 5700 non-X will be where it's at for value when they roll around.
  • just4U - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    Yeah I agree.. plus it's likely that prices will come down on these parts somewhat or be offered on sale or bundled..(saw a bit of that on launch day but they all sold out so whatever)
  • bananaforscale - Monday, November 9, 2020 - link

    "Value destroying price hike"? Sure for 3600 vs 5600X (which is *arguably* comparable), 3900X vs 5900X there's no contest. 5900X is demonstrably more than 10% faster is most cases. FWIW, I'd go for the 5800X over 10900K performance being equal because PCIe 4 and lower power draw.

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