Gaming Tests: Borderlands 3

As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.

BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:

  • 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass

BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.

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.

Gaming Tests: World of Tanks Gaming Tests: F1 2019
Comments Locked

279 Comments

View All Comments

  • ozzuneoj86 - Thursday, April 1, 2021 - link

    "Rocket Lake also gets you PCIe 4.0, however users might feel that is a small add-in when AMD has PCIe 4.0, lower power, and better general performance for the same price."

    If a time traveling tech journalist would have told us back in the Bulldozer days that Anandtech would be writing this sentence in 2021 in a nonchalant way (because AMD having better CPUs is the new normal), we wouldn't have believed him.
  • Hrel - Friday, April 2, 2021 - link

    Just in case anyone able to actually affect change reads these comments, I'm not even interested in these because the computer I built in 2014 has a 14nm processor too... albeit with DDR 3 RAM but come on, DDR4 isn't even much of a real world difference outside ultra specific niche scenarios.

    Intel, this is ridiculous, you're going to have been on the SAME NODE for a DECADE HERE!!!!

    Crying out loud 10nm has been around for longer than Intels 14nm, this is nuts!
  • James5mith - Saturday, April 3, 2021 - link

    " More and more NAS and routers are coming with one or more 2.5 GbE ports as standard"

    No, they most definitely are not. lol
  • Linustechtips12#6900xt - Monday, April 5, 2021 - link

    gotta say, love the arguments on page 9 lol
  • peevee - Monday, April 5, 2021 - link

    "the latest microcode from Intel should help increase performance and cache latency"

    Do we really want the increase in cache latency? ;) :)
  • 8 Cores is Enough - Wednesday, August 4, 2021 - link

    I just bought the 11900k with a z590 Gigabyte Aorous Pro Ax mobo and Samsung 980 pro 500GB ssd. This replaced my 9900k in a z390 Gigabyte Aurous Master with a 970 pro 512GB ssd.

    They're both 14nm node processors with 8c/16t and both overclocked, 5GHz all cores for 9900k and 5.2GHz all cores with up to 5.5GHz on one core via tiurbo modes on the 11900k.

    However, the 11900k outperforms the 9900k in every measure. In video encoding, which I do fairly often, it's twice as fast. In fact, the 11900k can comvert 3 videos at the same time each one as fast as my rtx 2070 super can do 1 video af a time.

    On UserBenchmark.com, my 11900k is the current record holder for fastest 11900k tested. It beats all the 10900k's even in the 64 thread server workload metric. It loses to the 5900x and 5950x in this one metric but clobbers them botb in the 1, 2, 4 and 8 core metrics.

    I wish I had a 5900x to test on Wondershare Uniconverter. I suspect my 11900k would match it given the 2X improvement over the 9900k, which was about 1/2 as fast as the 3950x in video comversion.

    I do a lot of video editing as well. Maybe on this workload an AMD 5900x or 5950x would beat the 11900k. It seems plausible so let's presume this and accept Ryzen 9 is most likely still best for video editing.

    But the cliam thaf being stuck on 14nm node means Intel RKL CPUs perform the same as Haswell or that they are even close does not make sense to me based on my experiences so far going from coffee lake refresh to RKL.

    The Rocket Lake CPUs are like the muscle cars of 1970. They are inefficient beasts that haul buttocks. They exist as a matter of circumstance and we may never see the likes of them again.

    Faster more efficient CPUs will be built but the 11th gen Intel CPUs will be remembered for being the back ported abominations they are: thirsty and fast with the software of 2021 which for the time being still favors single thread processing.

    If you play Kerbal Space Program then get an 11900k because that game is all about single thread performance and right now the 11900k beats all other CPUs at that.
  • Germanium - Thursday, September 2, 2021 - link

    My experimentation with my Rocket Lake Core I 11700k on my Asus Z590-A motherboard has shown me that it least on some samples AVX512 can be more efficient & cooler running than AVX2 at the same clock speed.

    I am running my sample at 4.4GHz both AVX512 & AVX2. When running Hand Brake there is nearly a 10 watt savings when running AVX512 as opposed to AVX2.

    Before anyone says Hand Brake does not use AVX512 & that is true out of the box but there is a setting script I found online to activate AVX512 on Hand Brake and it does work. It most be manually entered, no copy & paste available.

    With stock voltage settings at 4.2GHz using AVX2 at was drawing over 200 watts. With my settings I am able to run AVX512 at 4.4 GHz with peak wattage in Hand Brake of 185 watts. That was absolute peak wattage. It mostly ran between 170 to 180 watts. AVX2 runs about 10 watts more for slightly less performance at same clock speed.
  • Germanium - Thursday, September 2, 2021 - link

    Forgot to mention that on order to make AVX512 so efficient one must set the AVX Guard Band voltage Offset at or near 0 to bring the power to acceptable levels. Both AVX512 & AVX2 must be lowered. If AVX2 is not lowered at least same amount AVX512 setting will have little or no effect.
  • chane - Thursday, January 13, 2022 - link

    I hope my post is considered on topic

    Scenario 1: Without discrete graphics 1080p grade card, using on-chip graphics: Given the same core count (but below 10 cores), base and turbo frequencies and loaded with the same Cinebench and/or Handbrake test loads, would a Rocket lake Xeon w series processor run hotter, cooler or about the same as a Rocket Lake i family series processor with the same TDP spec?

    Scenario 2: As above but with 1080p grade discrete graphics card.

    Note: The Xeon processor pc will be using 16GB of ECC memory, however much that may impact heat and fan noise.

    Please advise.
    Thanks.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now