Intel Core i7-11700K Review: Blasting Off with Rocket Lake
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 5, 2021 4:30 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- 14nm
- Xe-LP
- Rocket Lake
- Cypress Cove
- i7-11700K
Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5
The fifth title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration with a lot of configurability.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like us changing the resolution in the results file when using certain monitors, resorting to 1080p but keeping the quality settings. But resolution scaling does work, so we decided to fix the resolution at 1080p and use a variety of different scaling factors to give the following:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1440p Max.
Far Cry 5 outputs a results file here, but that the file is a HTML file, which showcases a graph of the FPS detected. At no point in the HTML file does it contain the frame times for each frame, but it does show the frames per second, as a value once per second in the graph. The graph in HTML form is a series of (x,y) co-ordinates scaled to the min/max of the graph, rather than the raw (second, FPS) data, and so using regex I carefully tease out the values of the graph, convert them into a (second, FPS) format, and take our values of averages and percentiles that way.
If anyone from Ubisoft 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 gaming tests, we run each resolution/setting combination for a minimum of 10 minutes and take the relevant frame data for averages and percentiles.
| 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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nandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Alder Lake on 10nm will fix everything, and be out before the end of the year.kgardas - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
The power consumption you comment shows while using AVX512 on hand optimized test. Your idea about Alder Lake to solve this is not the correct one as Alder Lake itself will not implement AVX512 ISA at all. IMHO very bad decision by Intel again.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Yeah, some weak ant sized atom cores are what intel needs to fix this problem LOLnandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
You don't need more than 8 big cores for gaming. With a real IPC improvement, 8+8 should be able to beat the 5900X.lmcd - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Not likely, but it'll at least beat the 5800X and probably go even on efficiency. The real upside is in the server space and laptop space. I expect Alder Lake to do excellently in both of those segments.nandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Alder Lake's Golden Cove cores should have a decent IPC improvement over Rocket Lake, so 8 of those cores should be able to match more than 8 Zen 3 cores. Then throw in the 8 Gracemont Atom cores which will be better than Tremont. 8+8 should top 5900X but not 5950X in multi-threaded, and beat Zen 3 in gaming.There's caveats, perhaps related to DDR5 or schedulers, but I will be surprised if the top Alder Lake chip can't beat the 5900X.
DigitalFreak - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
Sorry, but in this case 8 + 8 does not equal 16.nandnandnand - Friday, March 5, 2021 - link
5900X is 12 cores, not 16. That's what Alder Lake 8+8 has a chance of beating.SaturnusDK - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
The problem is that Alder Lake has been pushed to second half of 2021 at the earliest so it will not be competing against Zen3 but Zen4.Pneumothorax - Saturday, March 6, 2021 - link
It might be able to beat the 5900x, but by the time you add in Intel's overpriced motherboards (have you looked at Z590's recently?!) and the premium of DDR5, you're going to be at 5950x+ pricing.