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: GTA 5
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA to help optimize the title. At this point GTA V is super old, but still super useful as a benchmark – it is a complicated test with many features that modern titles today still struggle with. With rumors of a GTA 6 on the horizon, I hope Rockstar make that benchmark as easy to use as this one is.
GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
We are using the following settings:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data. The benchmark can also be called from the command line, making it very easy to use.
There is one funny caveat with GTA. If the CPU is too slow, or has too few cores, the benchmark loads, but it doesn’t have enough time to put items in the correct position. As a result, for example when running our single core Sandy Bridge system, the jet ends up stuck at the middle of an intersection causing a traffic jam. Unfortunately this means the benchmark never ends, but still amusing.
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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zzzxtreme - Sunday, March 7, 2021 - link
I wished you would have tested the XE graphicsFman4 - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Am I the only one find that OP plugged 4 RAMs on an X570 ITX motherboard?Fman4 - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
@Dr. Ian Cutresszodiacfml - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
bored. just here to say this is unsurprising though this strongly reminds me of the time where AMD is releasing new, well designed CPUs but two process node generations behind intel. I think AMD was 32nm and 28nm while Intel is 22 and 14nm. most comments were really harsh with AMD but I reasoned that it is simply due to the manufacturing superiority of Intelblppt - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
Bulldozer and Piledriver are not the examples I would put up for "well designed".GeoffreyA - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
Still, within that mess, AMD did a pretty good job raising Bulldozer's IPC and cutting down its power each generation. But the foundation being fatally flawed, it was hopeless. I believe it taught them a lot about cutting power and so on, and when they poured that into Zen, we saw the result. Bulldozer was a fantastic training ground, if one looks at it humorously.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
No, AMD did an extremely poor job.Firstly, Bulldozer had worse IPC than Phenom. No engineers with brains release a CPU to replace the entire line while giving it worse IPC. The trap of going for high clocks was a lesson shown to the entire industry via Netburst. AMD's engineers knew all about it, yet someone at the company decided to try Netburst 2.0.
Secondly, AMD was so sloppy and lazy that Piledriver shipped with a performance regression in AVX. It was worse to use AVX than to not use it. How incredibly incompetent can the company have been? It doesn't take a high IQ to understand that one doesn't ship broken AVX.
AMD then refused to replace Piledriver until Zen came out. It tinkered half-heartedly with APU rubbish and focused on pushing junk like Jaguar.
While it's true that the extreme failure of AMD (the construction core line) is due, to a large degree, to Intel abusing its monopoly to starve AMD of customers and cash — cash it needed to do R&D, one does not release a new chip with worse IPC and then very shortly after break AVX and refuse to stop feeding that junk to customers for many years. Just tinkering with Phenom would have been better (Phenom 3).
As for the foundation claim... we have no idea how well the CMT concept could have worked out with competent engineering. Remember, they literally broke AVX in the Piledriver revision that was supposed to fix Bulldozer enough to make it sellable. Operations caching could have been stronger. The L3 cache was almost as slow as main memory. The RAM controller was weak, just like Phenom's. Etc.
We paid for Intel's monopoly and we're still paying today. Only its monopoly and the lack of adequate competition is enabling the company to be so profitable despite failing so badly. Relying on two companies (or one 1/2, when it comes to R&D money ratio and other factors) to deliver adequate competition doesn't work.
Google and Microsoft = Google owns the clearnet. Apparently, they have some sort of cooperation agreement which helps to explain why Bing has such a tiny index and such a poor-quality search.
TSMC and Samsung = Can't meet demand.
AMD and Nvidia = Nvidia keeps breaking profit records while utterly failing to meet demand. Both companies refuse to stop making their cards attractive for mining and have for a long long time. AMD refused to adequately compete beyond the lower midrange (Polaris forever, or you can buy a 'console'!) for a long time, leaving us to pay through the nose for Nvidia's prices. AMD literally competes against the PC market by pushing the console scam. Consoles are gaming PCs in disguise and they're parasitic in multiple ways, including in terms of wafer allocations. AMD's many many years of refusal to compete with Nvidia beyond the Polaris price point caused so much pent-up demand and now the company can enjoy the artificially high price points from that. It let Nvidia keep raising prices to get consumers used to that. Now that it has finally been forced to improve the 'consoles' beyond the garbage-tier Jaguar CPU it has to offer a bit more value to the PC gaming market. And so, after all these years, we have something decent that one can't buy. I can go on about this so-called competition but why bother. People will go to the most extravagant lengths to excuse the problem of lack of adequate competition — like the person who recently said it's easier to create Google's empire from scratch than it is to make a competitive GPU and sell it as a third GPU company.
There are plenty of other areas in tech with inadequate competition, too.
blppt - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 - link
"AMD then refused to replace Piledriver until Zen came out. It tinkered half-heartedly with APU rubbish and focused on pushing junk like Jaguar."To be fair, AMD had put a LOT of time, money and effort into Bulldozer/Piledriver, and were never a company with bottomless wells of cash to toss an architecture out immediately. Plus, Zen took a long time to design and finalize---thankfully, they made literally ALL the right moves in designing it, including hiring the brilliant Jim Keller.
I think if Zen had been another BD like failure, that would have been the almost the end of AMD in the cpu market (leaving them basically as ATI was) The consoles likely would have gone with Intel or ARM for their next iteration. AMD once again spent tons of money that they don't have as disposable income in designing Zen. Two failures in a row would have been disastrous.
Heck, the consoles might go with their own custom ARM design for PS6/Xbox(whatever) anyways.
GeoffreyA - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
blppt. Agreed, that would have been the end of AMD.Oxford Guy - Wednesday, March 10, 2021 - link
AMD did not put a lot of resources into fixing Bulldozer.It shipped Piledriver with broken AVX and never bothered to replace Piledriver on the desktop until Zen.
Inexcusable. It shipped Steamroller and Excavator in cost-cut mode, cutting cores, cutting clocks, cutting the socket standards, and cutting cache. It used a dense library to save money by keeping the die small and used the inferior 28nm bulk process.
Pathetic in basically every respect.